Sauerkraut-Peanut Butter Sandwiches

Don’t Knock ’em til you Try ’em.

When a good cook friend who makes litres of sauerkraut for personal use insists that he lives on sauerkraut-peanut butter sandwiches on his home-made sourdough bread, you have to be a bit skeptical. But when he trades you a jar for some of your home-made fig jam so you can make cabbage rolls, you have to put some aside to try at least one sandwich and see if this guy is in his right mind. 2 sandwiches later, I am convinced he is, in fact, mentally stable.

I had every right to be skeptical, however, since a lot of cooks actually eat very poorly. They never get to sit down to eat meals during their ridiculously long kitchen shifts, and at the end of the night the last thing they want to do is go home and cook a nutritious meal for themselves. In terms of taste, they also become accustomed to over-salted, over-sweetened, over-buttered, and over-fattened foods since restaurant food is not everyday food, at least not the restaurants where this friend works or has worked.

So I figured that enjoying puckeringly vinegary, salty sauerkraut on appropriately-named sourdough might be an acquired taste. But that would all depend on the sauerkraut, and the only way to judge fairly would be to use the cook’s own sauerkraut with his proper ratio of vinegar:salt:cabbage in my own sandwich before I called him crazy (says the girl who eats saag by the gallon, I know…). I should have known it would be better than I thought, since this friend is a pickling master. That’s maybe not a real thing, but it should be, and he should have the diploma.

One BIG scoop of sauerkraut and one thick smear of natural peanut butter later, and I was almost a convert. My natural peanut butter failed, but as long as you have a fresh one that doesn’t have much salt or sugar added, you’ll get a real sense of what the sandwich is supposed to be. You don’t need to use sourdough bread but if you like sour flavour, the sauerkraut and the bread together are heavenly. I wimped out on the sour factor and decided the sandwich would be better (aka “sweeter”…) with almond butter. Not having almond butter, I just ate some raw natural almonds with it instead – soaked and dehydrated, because I’m quasi-“raw” like that. So you could use any nut butter you wanted, but to balance the sourness of the fermented cabbage I’d say almond or maybe cashew would be your best bets.

My verdict? Lets just say if I ever have an opened bottle of sauerkraut lying around, I’ll know what to do with it.