As a sauerkraut fanatic, I always intended to make my own someday. My grandmother made sauerkraut in a barrel. There was wooden disk inside the barrel with a stone on top that kept the cabbage submerged. In my fantasy, I was going to get a big food-safe plastic container and make 20 pounds of the stuff. Then I read some recipes for making small amounts in a bowl. In these simple recipes, you chop up cabbage, salt it, put it in a bowl with a plate and weight on top.
There’s no need to add anything–the cabbage makes its own brine. The ratio is 3 tablespoons pickling salt to 5 pounds of cabbage. I chopped up three heads of cabbage. It came out to six and a half pounds, so I used 4 tablespoons of pickling salt. The reason you use pickling salt is because it is very fine so it dissolves fast and its free of additives to the brine doesn’t get cloudy.
Winter is the best time to make sauerkraut because you can keep it outside. It takes about two weeks to ferment, and it smells up the whole house if you keep it inside. I put the bowl on the patio in a giant beer cooler on wheels. I used a brick wrapped in aluminum foil for a weight. Sometimes you get a moldy looking scum on top that you have to skim off. I’ll keep you posted on the fermentation progress.
I have been making Sauerkraut here in Houston for about three years. I usually don’t make it in the middle of the summer, but the rest of the year it works fine.
It does not smell nearly as much (or as bad) as you imply. But my wife bought me a Harsch Crock a couple of years ago that has a vapor lock lid that prevents the escaping of much of the odors into the room. It also keeps the stray mold or yeast spoors from getting into your fermentation.
You will love it!
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My wife gave me a kit a last year for Christmas and I have made a few batches already. Actually, I’ve got one batch that was made a couple of months ago and is ready to be canned in the fridge. I usually use Celtic sea salt instead of pickling salt and a spoon full of live sauerkraut for the starter. This gets the fermentation started quicker.
You will definitely enjoy it!
You could use a brewing bucket with a standard brewer’s airlock. It would be much cheaper than that crock and you would still keep out the wild yeast and such.