Need the advice of decent cooks and sauerkraut connaisseurs:

I follow the recipes by frying the raw sauerkraut in butter, adding stock, grated potato and apple, bacon, sausage etc cook it for 1 or even 2 hours but it is always way too sour!

Please tell me how I can avoid creating sloppy messes that look like they've crawled up the drain pipe..

Tablespoon of brown sugar or Swiss-molasses added to the pot, then cook as normal.

Kirsch is your friend.

Sauerkraut should be cooked and served immediately, pale amber to gold in colour. Sweaty, greasy stuff looks and tastes yuck.

I use goose fat, a finely chopped onion, 10+/- crushed juniper berries, a grated raw potato, 300ml of light stock and a glass of white wine.

Melt fat on a low flame; once the onion is sizzling add the washed and drained cabbage with berries for around 15mins. Then the wine and a little stock, but never so much it floats in the liquid.

Leave for around 1.5 hours, adding more stock as necessary. Season with a little salt and pepper. Later, stir in the potato, leave for about 15mins. Just before serving, add a glass of Kirsch. Gin also does the trick.

Serve on a hot dish, preferably with a roast bird, surrounded by crispy fried bacon.

Any left overs can be made into soup; simmer for another hour with around half a litre of stock, puree and serve with thick cream.




You did ask.

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I concur with Uncle Max's advice.

I think the main determinant of sweetness is the proportion of onion in your dish and how much that's been cooked.

Thanks for that. I will try adding more sugar, though I hope it just won't add to the acidity of my festering mess. I was even thinking of adding more and more potato, but am afraid it will become a pasty lump.

Indeed...Max is on top of things as usual... Just a bit more about balancing acid in your mouth. There are 4 taste elements we all share in varying degrees of intensity: sweet, salt, acid and bitter. These elements, if taken alone, can often appear overwhelming...or, in your case, one of the elements is a bit too much - acid. There are two ways to counteract acid: increase sweet or increase bitter. Since most people frown from increasing the latter, let's just focus on the former...sweet. Sweet does not have to be the sweet we are all used to...sugars. Our sweet receptacles also perceive fat as sweet, which is why fat tastes good to many people...fat can also be a type of alcohol...so, Max had it right with the alcohol and fat: crispy bacon, goose fat and of course kirsch...

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Which sweet receptacles would these be? I'm not sure exactly what you mean here.

As a start you should limit the ingredients. Just take the Sauerkraut, add plenty of butter and quite some soy-sauce and have it in a pan for a quarter hour (max half an hour) and then try it.

Sorry...on the tongue...We all have taste buds responsible for certain tastes...mostly the sweet ones are toward the front...the salty ones are on the side...acid is usually just behind the salty ones...and bitter is usually toward the back of the mouth...

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Thanks . . . I'm aware of sweet receptors on the tongue. Are you saying that these are responsible for tasting fat though? Fat isn't really a taste as such. It's a carrier for other flavours. Do you have a reference for this somewhere?

The textural role of fat per se is probably more important when eating. A secondary to that its ability to carry other flavours.

Reading this article it seems that there are some specialised fat taste receptors, but these are not the same as the sweet ones:

http://www.thehealthculture.com/2009...taste-fat.html

Tasting fat per se...no...The perception of fat (almost exclusively animal fat) is sweet, and this has to do with the presence of specific fatty acids and in some cases glycerol (also in many alcohols, including a high presence in new-world style wines, which is why they are perceived sweeter)... There is a lot of information available about this topic on the internet...from my perspective, I spent about one year studying food + wine matching in Italy and this topic of how we perceive and balance tastes was very important in the Italian method. Another source for finding out about tastes and the chemical actions behind them is Harold McGee...

Harold McGee

The other information I have is in Italian and copyrighted (not interested in posting in a public forum)...I would be happy to send you an abstract off-line if you would like to pursue this information...

Jack

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Thanks . . . I have the McGee book at home. I'll look it up later.

Saying that we perceive fat as sweet is a rather different claim than your original one saying that the sweet receptors on the tongue responded to fat.

^^Good job he's better at cooking scrummy meals than explaining online, then, eh?

Hate to be pedantic, but this has now proven to be incorrect, all taste-specific receptors are located all over the mouth, including on the epiglottis and palate. Some areas may be more sensitive to certain tastes, but this is subject to individual variation.