Trip to Three Stone Hearth: Part 1

Trip to Three Stone Hearth: Part 1

My friend Liz (above left) and I (above right) took a trip up to Three Stone Hearth last Thursday.

I have a lot of photos so I’m going to split this up into a number of posts.

Three Stone Hearth is a community supported kitchen (or CSK) in Berkeley, California, founded by Jessica Prentice, Larry Wisch, Porsche Combash, Misa Koketsu, and Catherine Spanger. A community supported kitchen is very much like community supported agriculture (or CSA), where you become a member of a farm and get a box of vegetables each week.

With a CSK, members join the kitchen and each week they can order a box of prepared foods available for pick up or delivery. There is no minimum with Three Stone Hearth — and you don’t have to have a standing order.

The foods are made with sustainably-raised local produce, meats and dairy products whenever possible, because they believe in supporting small-scale, local, ecological, and pasture-based farmers and ranchers.

Angelique and Larry

My friend Angelique (above left) drove from San Francisco to volunteer with us. (That is co-owner, Larry Wisch on the right).

We volunteered in the kitchen on Friday and then on Saturday night we attended the Full Moon Feast (which I will write about in another post).

Liz Making Sauerkraut

Liz and I jumped right in and started jarring sauerkraut.

Jarring SauerkrautLiz and the Harsch Crock

Angelique was cleaning and peeling carrots for the coleslaw for the Full Moon Feast. We also used carrots in a batch of sauerkraut.

Cleaning and Peeling Carrots

Then she put the carrots into a big food grinder to shred them.

Processing the Carrots

Here’s Otto shredding cabbage for sauerkraut and coleslaw:

Otto Shredding Cabbage

Here are the Harsch crocks they use to ferment the sauerkraut and pickles. They have about 25, which they special-ordered all the way from Germany.

Harsch Crocks

They ferment the sauerkraut and pickles for 6-8 weeks.

That’s all for today. I’ll post more tomorrow!

POSTSCRIPT: You can’t ferment sauerkraut in a mason jar for 6-8 weeks. It would turn to mush!

You can only do this in a Harsch crock. It has a “water lock” system that is designed to lock in the good stuff and let the bad gasses escape.

They did tell us that if you can get a crock, fermenting your food longer is much more nutritious. I posted a link below in the comments with a place that sells the crocks.