How to ferment cabbage the old-school way

How to ferment cabbage the old-school way

For three hundred years, fermented cabbage was the only thing keeping sailors alive at sea. One captain crossed the entire world, three years at sea, and didn't lose a single man to scurvy. This was why.
Cabbage. Salt. Time. Nothing else.
The fermentation doesn't just preserve the cabbage. It pulls the vitamin C out and makes it something your body can actually absorb. Vitamin K2. Live cultures. The kind of thing they now sell in pills.
They didn't shred it back then. They left the heads whole, buried them in salt and water in a crock, and let time do the rest. Whole heads mean whole leaves, leaves you can wrap meat in or roll into sarma.
How to make it:
Whole cabbages, washed with a baking soda rinse. Core each one and pack salt into the centers. Layer into a crock. Cover with a 2% salt brine, about 20 grams of salt per liter of water. Top with cabbage leaves and a fermentation weight to keep everything submerged. Cover and ferment a few weeks to a few months in a cool place. Cooler temperatures give a crunchier, cleaner result.
Eat it straight from the crock, wrap meat in the leaves, or roll them into sarma. The same way it's been done for a thousand years.