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.

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 and I jumped right in and started jarring sauerkraut.

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

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

Here’s Otto shredding cabbage for sauerkraut and coleslaw:

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.

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.