I was at the grocery store, minding my own business, when I saw something that shocked me to the core. As you have probably guessed, it was a jar of sauerkraut. It was an ordinary jar of sauerkraut, at an ordinary store, albeit one with excellent chicken salad.
What stopped me in my tracks was the price. It was 12 dollars. Twelve dollars for a jar of sauerkraut.
Sauerkraut is not some magical substance, painstakingly created with secret, biodynamic ingredients in a process that requires superhuman precision and skill. Sauerkraut is made from exactly two ingredients, cabbage and salt. That’s all.
And they happen to be two of the cheapest ingredients you can find. And it’s not like they’re hard to combine. Cut a cabbage into shreds, add salt and let it sit for maybe a week.
Voila — sauerkraut. That does not cost 12 dollars. That’s less than a buck and, at most, 10 minutes of your time.
I would like to tell you that homemade sauerkraut tastes better, much better, than the sauerkraut you buy at the store. But it actually tastes exactly the same. We’re dealing with cabbage and salt here, and there’s not a lot of room for variation.
I am not what you would call a do-it-yourselfer. I come from a non-do-it-yourselfing family. We aren’t good with our hands.
In junior high school, I took typing instead of shop, and to this day I don’t understand how machinery works or even how to use certain tools. I was a pretty decent typist, though, which made me stand out until ce.
