Whenever I make sauerkraut, you're supposed to keep a few whole outer leaves to push on top of the shredded cabbage and tuck down around the outer edges, to keep it submerged during the fermentation process, since if any cabbage floats up and breaks the water and stays there, it can allow bad bacteria to thrive and bridge down into all of the underlying cabbage that is only apparently submerged and separated from the ambient air, but is not in actuality.
Only, you have to be careful that there's no dirt on those outer leaves or even like weird slightly-discolored abrasions that might harbor residual dirt, since that can introduce big amounts of bad bacteria into the cabbage at large, and it can then take root in all of it and go on to spoil the whole entire batch.
So, lately, what I've been doing is keeping any of those big outer leaves with slightly weird spots, and carving out the weird spots, and then keeping the remaining cabbage leaves to eat in salads.
I mean, I wouldn't risk it for fermentation, but there's still perfectly good leaf there, that you can use for other things and eat in different ways.
Why waste it?
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