So I've tasted my sauerkraut, I gave it a week to ferment.

If you remembered I did one jar with salt and another without. The one without salt tasted sour something that would taste like kraut while the one with salt was very sweet and bitter tasting (not pleasant)

The question I am having is that the recipe I followed calls for you to put in salt with the cabbage, carrot, and onion mixture to help pull water out of all the ingredients through osmosis to make the brine that the kraut will ferment in.

I just finished reading chapter 8 (Hostile Environment) in our March of the Microbe book, and it talks about how salt is a preservative, it states  " Salt has also been used since ancient times as a food preservative, because high concentration of salt prevent the growth of microbes.

So I started thinking maybe the jar without salt is the only jar that is fermenting even though the recipe calls for you to use salt..........?

So I have decided to do trial number two. I am going to try a different recipe, one that specifies how much salt to put in......maybe enough salt to cause osmosis but not enough to prevent microbes from forming.

Again I will make two jars one with salt and one without. Hopefully the jar that I follow a recipe works.  So I am off to the store to try this sauerkraut project again!