With my friends Omar and Meg’s upcoming nuptials, I’ve been finding myself more involved with wedding fever than I ever thought possible. We’ve been doing a lot of the food prep in advance and freezing it before we travel down to Florida for the ceremony. In this post I will discuss just one of the many fun vegetarian and vegan foods we are creating for the special occasion.

Raw vegan kraut is an easy and delicious recipe. All you need are your kraut ingredients (whatever you want depending on the kind you’re making), a glass container with a top and sea salt. It is very important that no metal objects or utensils come near this dish while you’re creating it. I recommend using glass storage jars and wooden spoons to make your kraut.

We made one jar with just cabbage and a few cardamon seeds and another with cabbage, carrots, onion, hot red pepper (from the garden) and fresh ginger.  To start our kraut, we cut 22 pounds of cabbage into thin strips and set them in glass bowls. You want 3 tablespoons of sea salt for every 5 pounds of cabbage. You may want to use a kitchen scale; if you do not have a kitchen scale, do like we did and remember how much cabbage you purchased and then measure out your sea salt separately and use accordingly. For every thin layer of cabbage you put down in the jar, sprinkle some sea salt and mix well using your wooden spoon. Then put down another layer of cabbage and repeat until all your cabbage is used or your jar is full. The cabbage will work itself down in a matter of minutes during and after the process is completed.  The sea salt works all of the water out of the cabbage creating a natural brine.  You are going to let your cabbage sit for about 2 weeks in the jar and trust me, it gets better every single day it sits in that jar. You are going to want to try it and I encourage that! It’s interesting to see the way the flavor changes over time.

We did the second jar with more ingredients the same way. We put a little of each ingredient in, sprinkled the salt and stirred. It’s fun to try different flavors with different ingredients. I think this kraut will be a hit at our night before the wedding BBQ.