January/February 2023 - 13

RETORT
jars and we place them in our retort baskets and stack the
jars four high, and then we just roll them into the retort, " he
said. " Once we do that, we're able to do about 800 jars at one
time. We close the door and make sure
our equipment meets the parameters and
hit the start button. We watch it do its
thing for about an hour and 20 minutes,
and once it completes the cooking recipe,
we open the door and the product is
nice and cool. We just wheel the trays
out, take the jars off and we stack them
on a pallet, and we don't have to touch
them ever again.
" The consistency of our product is what
we want every time. It just looks beautiful. "
Such details are important to the Rome family, whose
patriarch, Ray Rome, began handing out jars of his homemade
Bavarian-style sauerkraut in the mid-1980s. The simple
family recipe of sliced cabbage and salt and water allows for
natural fermentation and does not permit the use of vinegar
to accelerate that process.
" Everybody in our family was against preservatives, " Rome said.
" It should maintain itself. It's a sauerkraut. And when you look at
nine out 10 sauerkrauts on the shelf, they all have preservatives
in them, and they simply are not as flavorful as ours. "
Introducing the retort has allowed Hoganville to maintain
that natural focus while scaling up automated production.
" Maintaining a cooking recipe, that's what the retort did, "
The simple family recipe of
sliced cabbage and salt and
water allows for natural
fermentation and does not
permit the use of vinegar to
accelerate that process.
Rome said. " If we're driving down a twolane
road, we're going to be bouncing
from lane to lane, but if we have an
automated driving car, that car should
be able to maintain the center of your
driving lane. That's what the retort
allowed us to do, was to maintain the
cooking recipe. "
Rome hopes that as his company
continues to grow, more people get to
experience the time and taste that goes
into his family's sauerkraut.
" I would love for us to become a household name with
sauerkraut. I would like to see the whole image of sauerkraut
turned around, as it can be a flavorful food for the palate, " he
said. " When we do festivals where we sample our sauerkraut
and we get a small family that comes to our booth, a lot of
the times the kids will come up and say, 'Yeah, I'd like to try
it.' But then the parents will say, 'Oh, you're not going to like
that.' That is what's disappointing.
" To bring the open-mindedness back towards sauerkraut
would be a really good direction for this to go in. "
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13
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January/February 2023

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