Apple, mango, pink grapefruit, cabbage, orange, pear, peach. Let's play spot the odd one out.
No? Ok, let's see if you can get this one. There are two odd ones here: Squeezed, fermented, sweetened, pulped, heavily salted.
How about fermented, heavily salted cabbage juice? Now that's about as odd as it gets.
Flippin' heck, I hear you say. Rehydrated scrambled egg - fine. Medicinal marshmallows - so what? Breathable chocolate - BORING. But surely – I'm still doing your part of the conversation here – DDD wouldn't go so far as to let this vegetal bilge water pass her lips merely to entertain our at-best-passing interest in vicarious investigative gastronomy? Yes I arseing well would, and you know it.
Sauerkraut means 'sour cabbage' - or as Larousse says:
White cabbage that has been finely sliced, dry-salted and fermented. Sauerkraut is popular in parts of France (particularly in Alsace and Lorraine), Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Poland and the Balkans.
The sharpness comes from lactic acid bacteria which pickles the shredded vegetable. It's wildly good for you. As in the ubiquitous Korean dish kimchi, the anaerobic fermentation maintains vitamin C, and there are all sorts of other excitingly healthy-sounding compounds lurking just beneath the surface.
With an eye for efficiency, the German nation has invented an easy to consume form of sauerkraut. Juice the blighter. The large carton suggests that one can add it to beetroot or carrot juice - and consume it three times a day, which regime makes old Mr Kellogg's flake-forcing and electroshock therapy routine look like a day at the races.
As a certain tired televisual cook-off would have it: Healthy eating. Doesn't. Get tougher. Than this.
It smells just like sauerkraut - a sweetly sour, almost milky tang laid over the sulphurous, brassic wafts of vegetable matter. Have you ever made a compost heap? I'm just asking … And by now you will have realised that I've been whiffling away in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable. Down the hatch, me old muckers, and let's see you out the other side …
EEEUUUURGGHH!!!!!! Picture my face. Now stop laughing, damn you. BLOODY HELL that's disgusting. It's like neat vinegar, into which a small mammal of questionable personal hygiene has crawled, bathed and drowned.
So many words spring to mind: fetid, suppurating, gangrenous, teeth-clenching, dangerous. It's slightly less nice than downing all the liquid from a pickle jar, vomiting it back up, straining it through a sweat-soaked gym towel, then drinking it with a straw.
No no no no no. I couldn't give a flying fuck that it's 'good for me'. It's going to be hard to soldier on even knowing I share a world with this putrescence of a grocery item, let alone insult my innards by attempting to ingest it. Vile vile vile. The horror. THE HORROR.
Now excuse me while I raid the cleaning cupboard for something to gargle with …
Well there's one not to read in a public place. Your self-inflicted misfortune was my gain, and also the gain of everyone in my house who got to laugh at me giggling into my laptop like a special case.
Posted by: Lexy | 09/16/2010 at 12:57 PM