Hey all,If there was a fairly tight seal between the plate and the sides, then it may have stayed anaerobic. But it's troubling since it sounds as if air did get in.
I made a 5 gallon bucket of sauerkraut this fall. It came out fine. You know
the method, slice the cabbage, salt and pack hard into a 5 gallon bucket. I
covered with a couple of cabbage leaves, a plate and weighed that down. The
ferment was slow, cause the basement a bit cool. A couple of weeks ago, I
noticed that it needed some water. I boiled some water, added salt and after
cooling added the brine to the kraut to bring the level up to where it needed
to be.
I also removed a few handfuls and ate it. Good.Yeast aren't harmful and they sure beat lots of other aerobes that can get into your mix.
Now there is a funky growth on top of the water that smells yeasty. I sat the kraut in a real cold area (not freezing, but close) so that would not be able to grow.But it doesn't seem to have stayed anaerobic, since you had enough oxygen to produce a good growth of yeast. It must have already been growing when you added the new brine, since the boiled brine contained little new free oxygen to stimulate yeast growth. It sounds silly, but when you add liquids to a pickle or sauerkraut, it's best not to splash a lot, since every bit of dissolved oxygen creates that much more yeast. Some people even top them off with a dash of oil to exclude air.
Whaddya think that growth is?I would say....Yeast! The secret to understanding yeast is that they can do their usual sugar-to-alcohol thing with no oxygen, but to divide and grow requires oxygen. The bacteria you want to grow require no oxygen for anything, but neither are they harmed by it.
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