Thanks for reading! I use Celtic sea salt (I use this in all my cooking). I’ve been meaning to get a grinder, but for now I use a mortar and pestle to get it down to a finer size. The Nourishing Traditions recipe calls for 1 Tbs salt to one medium sized cabbage. Since medium is pretty relative I don’t know how exact that proportion needs to be. Twice as much salt if no whey is used.

That’s a great hands-off technique. I can see the pounding getting old, esp if you do a larger batch. I know some people starting their kraut by the gallon!

I’ve used a more hands-off kraut recipe, from a pickling cookbook. I mix the cabbage and salt in a big bowl then let it sit around for ~30 minutes. The salt wilts the cabbage and gets the brine flowing, so you don’t have to pound it (that part looks like fun, though).

Did you use regular table salt? There’s something about using non-iodized salt or “pickling” salt in well, pickles, supposed to keep a better color. It also makes a difference if you use Kosher salt vs. fine granular because the same weight of salt will have a different volume.

FYI the scum that grew on my kraut looked a lot like yours. I didn’t document the whole process but you can read a bit about it here (sorry for the long address, I haven’t figured out how to embed HTML into text yet!): http://neighborhood-dish.blogspot.com/2008/12/canning-in-off-season.html