I think that one bad experience is too little on which to based a
lifetime's behaviour.

I have made kraut without whey and it has never gone slimy (nor gone
through a slimy phase). Kraut is the simplest veg to ferment but all I
find all the root veg ferment without probs, without slime and without
whey.

Whey is not a traditional ingredient of kraut or any other fermented
food. They have been made for centuries/millennia without whey and they
can still be made the same way, bacteria not having changed much. You
don't need to add LB via whey just as you don't need a commercial
starter culture to make sourdough. The little bugs are all around you
and they multiply at a rate which makes adding a few at the beginnning
pretty irrelevant.

Sorry if this sounds a bit terse but the difficulties of getting hold of
whey put me off fermenting for a long time when I first got hold of
Nourishing Traditions. I wouldn't want anyone else to delay for the same
reason.

Use it if you've got it and if you want to but you don't need it -- just
as you don't need kefir to make sourdough. You need to add salt and keep
the veg under the water where the air can't get at them. That's it. I
think the simplicity offends us and we want to complexify it. Salt,
clean water and exclude air. That's it.

Sally

dlmarykwas wrote:
> To me, when making sauerkraut or any other fermented vegetable product, it
makes more sense to include whey and a modest amount of salt than to rely upon
salt or acid vinegar or pepper or cabbage juice, hoping that these alternatives
(to direct inoculation) will favor the beneficial over the harmful bacteria.
Whey as a byproduct of fermenting cheese or making kefir etc. includes
overwhelming numbers of the beneficial lactic acid producing bacteria derived
from the starter culture and amplified during the cheese-making process. These
large numbers of beneficial bacteria can help ensure that any harmful bacteria
present in the cabbage or other ingredients are out-numbered. Also, many of the
beneficial bacteria used to ferment milk into cheese are the same as or similar
to those that are ultimately responsible for fermenting cabbage into kraut.
>
> Cabbage that is naturally fermented into kraut due to the actions of the
cabbage's indigeous bacteria undergoes a natural succession; at first coliform
bacteria are favored (coliforms can be pathogenic), then the slimy Leuconostoc
are favored, and finally the lactic acid bacteria such as Lactobacilli
predominate and esentially eliminate the coliforms and Leuconostoc. For better
or for worse, I suspect that the addition of whey might actually reduce the
numbers of coliforms or Leuconostoc or even Clostridium botulinum growing in
one's sauerkraut.
>
> I made one batch of cabbage kraut for a class I taught using a high- salt
no-whey recipe. It turned into a foul smelling slimy mess that I would not go
near. After that, I wasn't comfortable attempting kraut again until I chanced
upon recipes in Nourishing Traditions and in Klaus Kaufmann's Making Sauerkraut
that included whey.
>
> Donna, Southern California
>
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