Kraut and kimchi, where the vegetable makes its own brine
Updated
On this page5
Dry salting instead of a poured brine
Shredded cabbage mixed with salt draws its own liquid out over a few hours until the vegetable is submerged in brine it produced. The salt is still doing both jobs from the brine-strength page, which is why it is weighed against the weight of the vegetable rather than against a volume of water.
The consequence is that the first hours matter in a way they do not for a cucumber ferment. Until there is enough liquid, the top of the vessel is exposed, so this is the ferment where packing down and weighting are part of making it rather than part of tending it.
What stays the same
- The temperature window, and the same soft-product failure above it.
- Submersion, and a weight that holds through gas production.
- Surface attention for the whole run.
- The live-or-shelf-stable decision at the end.
What differs at the point of sale
Kraut and kimchi are more often sold live than cucumber pickles are, which pushes most of this product toward the cold chain and toward a closure that tolerates pressure. Kimchi in particular is usually expected to be live by the people buying it, so processing it for shelf stability changes what you are selling rather than extending it.
There is also a naming question that is not a packaging one. What a product may be called, and what a label has to disclose, is decided by the selling section rather than here, and it is worth settling before a label is ordered.
Why the salt is weighed against the vegetable
In a poured brine the concentration is salt against water, and the vegetable arrives into a solution you already made. In dry salting there is no water to measure: the brine does not exist until the salt has pulled it out, so the only stable reference is the weight of the shredded vegetable going in. That is why a kraut recipe reads as a percentage of vegetable weight while a pickle recipe reads as salt per volume of water, and why the two numbers are not comparable even when they look similar.
The practical effect is that a kitchen scale is not optional for this product. Volume measures fail twice over here, once on the salt for the bulk-density reason the salt page covers, and again on the cabbage, because shredded vegetable packs to whatever density you pressed it to.