Summer of Cabbage Love

Vegan oven baked sauerkraut

''Metaphorically, bigos means "confusion", "big mess" or "trouble" in Polish.'' (Thank you Wikipedia:)

    Why Woodstock is such an important event in music history? It's not only because so many big names played there, it's also because it was one of the first massive festivals that gathered hundreds of thousands young people, with nothing else then music, peace and love. I visited some cool festivals too. In my city there's one really big festival, in the beginning it started like Woodstock, as part of political protest, but later it turned commercial, and now ticket costs more then 100 euros. Although line up is quite cool. The greatest festival I ever visited was Woodstock.

One of the first photos of the festival I saw on the internet looked something like this. When I saw it I knew I need to go there by any means necessary.

     I didn't do it with some time portal or by taking large quantities of LSD. I really went there, by train, from Berlin. I guess by now you already know, that I'm talking about Polish Woodstock. It's one of the biggest festivals in Europe. Like on original Woodstock entrance is free. You aren't gonna listen to Jefferson Airplane or Credence Clearwater Revival, but there are bunch of Polish bands you never heard of, who after a lot of beers, soft drugs and presence of 500 000 people around you sound like Jimmy Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner guitar solo.

    Anyway I was there, jumping around to sounds of Polish rock, eating cheap Hare Krishna vegan portions, drinking dusty beer, playing hide and seek with people camping near me and of course there were the mud baths. Everything one great festival has to offer. And the crowd around me was cool, some cute Polish girls from Lublin, squatters from Netherlands who came to the forest 2 weeks before the festival and were the first who set camp there that year, 2 Gothic chicks from Berlin and a guy with Polk High Al Bundy football jersey, some Polish hippie-like guy and a girl who dug 2 big holes in which they stand for the whole day, Hare Krishna guys who are aggressively smiling at people and bunch of festival freaks from different countries, that I missed to exchange numbers or facebook accounts with. After only one night there I knew I hit the right spot, and that this festival is like no other, at least in Europe.

I couldn't believe this is gonna be the place where I'll find sauerkraut dish

    In the middle of all that I see Serbian flag in the crowds. I was seeing that flag almost every day at the concerts, but I was always to fucked up to go check whose is it. One day I firmly decided to check the Serbian flag, I go there, and I see a friend from Belgrade waving the flag.... Wooow man, wtf, what are you doing here?!
After some beers, he tells me:

 -Do you know they serve podvarak at the food stands?

-Nooo shit? They eat it here too?!

-Yeah man, they call it bigos in Polish, and you get a good portion too, for just one euro.

I guess people who read this blog already noticed in this post, my appreciation to any dish that contains sauerkraut. Podvarak is a sauerkraut baked in an oven with smoked meat and is one of the things I really missed when I turned vegan. Until one day,  I decided to make vegan version of it. Just to remember my Woodstock days under the sun.Vegan podvarak turned out great, and here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

-sauerkraut, 1 kg (2,2 lb)

-potatoes, 2 big ones, or 3 medium size (around 600 grams=21 oz),

After puting onion slices in oiled casserole

-onions, one big onion,

-garlic, chili flakes (smoked) or sweet paprika powder, bay leaf, black peppercorns, thyme, salt, oil.

1.  Oil your casserole and put sliced onion in it, spread onion slices around the whole bottom of the casserole. Put some salt on the onion slices, crush the garlic and add it too. 

2.  Then put the first layer of sauerkraut on top. Cut potatoes in cubes and add them on top of the sauerkraut. After adding the potatoes sprinkle some salt, chili or paprika (depends do you like it hot or mild), thyme, drop few peppercorns and bay leaf on top. Then add second layer of sauerkraut, the potatoes again, and same spices go on top. Last layer should be sauerkraut, and after adding all the same spices on the very top, pour some oil on your dish. 

3.  Sauerkraut loves fat, so don't be stingy with oil. I usually use cold pressed sunflower oil. Cover the casserole with aluminum foil, tuck it in. Leave it in preheated oven for one hour on 200 degrees. After that take it out, take off aluminum foil, leave it for a minute or two to rest and then put it back in the oven for another 30-45 minutes on the same temperature. Watch your oven from time to time, so it doesn't burn.

After adding first layer of sauerkraut, potatoes and spices.

    Podvarak is a great dish, people usually prepare it in the winter when they pull out their first sauerkraut out of the barrel. It goes well with some yogurtif you are vegetarian or some cooked (pickled) red beets salad with garlic. You can serve it with black bread and some buckwheat or millet kasha.

    Only person who probably missed original 1969. Woodstock more then me is my dad. He was 16 at a time and he was all into each and every band that played there. Back then they were ordering records from London record stores by post, working hard in the fields to earn money for new records of: The Beatles, Janis Joplin, The Who and Joe Cocker and his favorite musician of all times was Carlos Santana. I think most of people from Yugoslavia loved him, probably because they could feel in a right way his distinct fusion of latino sound with rock'n'roll, so unique, emotional and new in 60's USA and since Yugoslavia already heard and loved latino music with Yugoslav mariachi music from the 50's that made him really popular among Yugoslav youth. So while making this magnificent dish, try imagining how it felt to be on dairy farm on Catskill mountains, near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, state of New York, while Black Magic woman was played.

* Since all 4 days I camped on Polish Woodstock I was on all kinds of substances, I didn't took any photos there. Although I asked some of the people I met there to lend me some photos for this blog post. Now they are searching their old photo archives, looking for those. Until they find those I put some interesting photos of the festival I found on the internet, on web sites: roadeightyfive.com and deon.pl.

Enjoy vegan podvarak a.k.a. weganskie bigos.

Liberty cabbage

    Did you know that: during WW1, due to concerns the American public would reject a product with a German name, American sauerkraut makers relabeled their product as "Liberty cabbage" for the duration of the war. (Thank you Wikipedia)

    Sauerkraut is one of the healthiest stuff you can eat. It can literately rise you from the dead, without any candles and spooky rituals. I experienced that so many times, when after  getting shit faced and that ''please kill me now'' feeling in the morning I become Superman after just one glass of sauerkraut water (in Serbia also known as rasol).

    Sauerkraut is part of food that we call winter food (zimnica) in Serbia. That's food made out of processed vegetables that you prepare in the autumn, so you can eat it during winter time. Even when i was a kid, vegetables in shops and supermarkets during winter weren't so common, and if you even find them, they were quite expensive. Since Serbian people are used to constant economic crises and money shortage, they invented ways how to process vegetables while they are cheap (or free if you grow them on your own) so they can last during periods when they become expensive and kind of luxury (winter).

Serbs like their cabbage

    The most important member of winter foods family is definitely sauerkraut. My family used to prepare 100 kilos of sauerkraut every winter. We ate it every day. It's the thing that made us healthy, it's also the food that cured biggest health problem of early explorers, scorbut (lack of vitamin C). So if it was good for my family, Captain James Cook and his crew,  it's good for you too.    

    In Serbia they say that the best cabbage for making sauerkraut is the one from village called Futog. This place is all about cabbage, they have cabbage festival in the autumn, people selling cabbage on the road side etc. I'm not sure you can find that kind  of cabbage outside Serbia, but the main thing is to choose some cabbage that's lighter in weight. Making sauerkraut is cheap and fun. Like in video games there are 3 levels of difficulty easy, medium and hard. Last one needs little more labor, but the taste of the sauerkraut is so much better that way.

Autumn in Serbia, selling cabbage on the roadside

Ingredients:

10 kg (22 lbs) of cabbage,

200-300 g (7-10 oz) of salt,

water, black peppercorns, bay leaf.

1. Easy  

    First you need to find a clean plastic barrel with a top (in Serbia also known as katsa), some white cloth, few wooden boards that can fit in the barrel and one heavy stone.

Heavy stone is the most important piece of equipment.

You take how much cabbage you intend to put in your barrel. After buying it you leave it for a few days on the cold (outside). After that you take off outside leaves from each head, and you carve out the cabbage root with a knife, in a way that you get a deep hole. After that make few centimeters (an inch) deep cross mark on the cabbage with your knife. Center of the cross should be the hole where the cabbage root once was, and it should go all across the back of a cabbage head.

Cabbage head, properly carved up.

Fill the hole where the root was with salt. Then put your cabbage in the barrel, so the part with a hole is looking up. Some of the smaller heads you can cut in half one or two times, rub some salt on them and put them in between the other heads to fill up the void. Then put some more salt on top and in between cabbage heads, some black peppercorns and some bay leaf. Then pull some water over the cabbage, cabbage should be sunk in water, tuck it in white cloth, then put the wooden boards and the big stone on top, which you washed first. Leave it like that in the basement or somewhere else. Bigger the temperature in the room where cabbage is, it's gonna ferment faster, and if you leave it on some hot place it's gonna become too sour, and later it's gonna become rotten, so watch out where you keep it. After approximately one month, you can try your sauerkraut and feel proud of yourself..

Salted cabbage heads in the barrel before pouring water

2. Medium

    If you prepare your sauerkraut this way, you will make two different sauerkraut products. One of those two are the sauerkraut heads, which you can use for sarma and other is shredded sauerkraut, called ribanac in Serbian. To make ribanac you will need a cabbage shredder. Do all the same like in the easy mode. Leave cabbage you bought on the cold for a few days, then separate it in two piles, depends which kind of sauerkraut you like more, you can put more whole cabbage heads in the barrel or more shredded kind. With cabbage heads do the same as written in the easy mode manual, cut all cabbage from the other pile with your cabbage shredder, put it in-between cabbage heads, when you fill up all the void, start putting it on top, put one layer of cabbage, then add some salt, then take your shoes and your socks off, wash your feet and step on the cabbage in the barrel, you can jump on it as well (I told you it's fun), just watch out not to flip over the barrel. Then add some black peppercorns and bay leaf. Do the same until you use all the shredded cabbage (cabbage, salt, jump,pepper and bay leaf, repeat).

Shredding cabbage

    In the end give it some really good stomping, if cabbage didn't let out enough water to cover it, add some water, put the cloth on top, wooden boards and of course the heavy stone. Ribanac cabbage needs less time to become sauerkraut then cabbage heads, so you can eat it sooner. Check it from time to time.

 3. Hard

    This is a hard core way of preparing sauerkraut for really dedicated people. It's basically the same as the medium way, only difference is you need much more stepping and jumping on your cabbage. Main idea is to make cabbage  let enough water so it can be sunk and pressed without adding any additional water to the barrel. This is the best you can get, and believe me, after a month of anticipation, you will be amazed and very proud, and all the hard work you put into it will pay off. It's also important to chose right music for this kind of work.

    In the end I would like to mention some of the stuff you can do with your sauerkraut. You can eat it as a salad with some ground paprika on top, roll stuff in its leaves and make some veggie sarmas, bake it in the oven and make dish called podvarak (I was amazed when i saw the same dish in Poland where it's called bigos), cook it in the pot (preferably made out of clay) and make a dish called svadbarski kupus (wedding cabbage), fry it in the pan and serve it with some cooked potatoes for example, or as a side dish, drink saurkraut water (a.k.a. rasol) from it when you have a hang over (it helps, i tried), make a soup with it by using some sauerkraut and some water etc. There are infinite possibilities. Some of the dishes i put on this list are not vegetarian, like svadbarski kupus for example, but that's why i made this blog in the first place, to show people how they can prepare all those without any meat, and enjoy their food.

Photos: First two from kurir-info, forgot where the third is from, fourth is mine, fifth one is from coolinarka and the last one from the web site called mostarskaraja.