Food: Science Picture Challenge #2: The Science of Sauerkraut and Kim Chi

Everyone knows about alcohol fermentation, but did you know that you can ferment a lot of different foods? One of those foods is cabbage, and the magical end result of the fermentation of cabbage is, you guessed it, sauerkraut or Kim Chi.

Home Made and Store Bought Sauerkraut
Image is my own

Fermentation of foods occur when specific microorganisms are matched up with the right food. Instead of rotting, you get a wonderful result that is often more digestible than the original food. In the case of sauerkraut, finding the right organism for fermentation is easy because the specific bacterial cultures needed for proper fermentation occur naturally in the cabbage ⁽¹⁾.

Left to right: homemade sauerkraut with air loc,
beet kvass, and preserved lemons.
Image is my own

The right bacteria is why fermenting sauerkraut doesn't give us alcohol. To make alcohol, it requires yeast whose waste products are alcohol, but with sauerkraut, the lactobacillis bacteria from the sauerkraut create lactic acid as their waste products.

Give the microorganisms a bit of moisture, the right pH, enough salt to keep bad bacteria from proliferating at the beginning, an environment without oxygen (just make sure the cabbage is underwater) and a bit of time, and sauerkraut is inevitable! The lactic acid waste products also create an acidic environment that inhibit the colonization by bacteria that might be harmful for us ⁽²⁾. Eat the bacteria and that provides the gastrointestinal tract with healthy probiotic bacteria ⁽³⁾ . No need to take probiotics when you can just make them yourself.

(1) Impact of low salt concentration, salt quality on natural large-scale sauerkraut fermentation
(2) Probiotic bacteria in fermented foods: product characteristics and starter organisms
(3) The New Lifestyle: A Threat to Health?