Sauerkraut with porcini mushrooms

This vegan sauerkraut with mushrooms can be used as a dish on its own (for example over boiled potatoes or with a piece of bread), or as a starting point for Polish bigos (recipe here) which adds meat. Therefore, this is essentially a vegan bigos.

90 kcal per 1 C (without the optional ingredients)

Cooking time: 2 hrs

Instructions

1. Put 50 g of dried porcini mushrooms in a big bowl and add 3 C filtered water. Soak for at least 30 minutes, and up to overnight.
2. Put a strainer in a big bowl, and strain about 1700 (net) ml sauerkraut. Keep the juice until the vegan bigos is ready — you will be able to use it to adjust the sourness of the dish. If you don't like very sour dishes, you may want to rinse the sauerkraut a little bit, but try not to overdo it (in any case, in case you do, you will have the insurance policy in the form of the saved sauerkraut juice).
3. Dice 2 medium onions. Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a big pan, and fry the onions until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Don't burn.
4. Meanwhile, roughly chop the sauerkraut on a big cutting board, and put it in a big stainless steel pot.
5. With clean hands, wash the mushrooms in the bowl in which they have been soaking. You want to make sure that you get rid of all sand, either by mixing the mushrooms vigorously in the bowl, or maybe even washing each individual mushroom piece. Reserving the liquid, strain the mushrooms. Chop the mushrooms and add to the sauerkraut.
6. Add the fried onions to the sauerkraut, as well as all remaining ingredients: 2 bay leaves, 4 big all spice berries, 6 whole cloves, 1/2 tsp ground cumin, 1/2 tsp thyme, 10 prunes, and 1 C water.
7. Finally, when the liquid from soaking the mushrooms has been allowed to settle for a while, slowly pour it into the pot with sauerkraut. Pay attention to stop before you also pour in the sand and other stuff that will have gathered on the bottom of the glass or bowl that you kept your mushroom water in.
8. Cook for 1-1.5 hrs on low heat.
9. Optional: If you want to keep the bigos vegan and make it a full dish, you can add green lentils. For that, once the vegan bigos starts to simmer, cook 1 C of green lentils in salted water until just semi-done, then add to the pot with the sauerkraut.
10. After 1-1.5 hrs elapse, check whether the sauerkraut and mushrooms are soft. If the vegan bigos is not sour enough, you can add the reserved sauerkraut juice; conversely, if it's too sour, you can add some honey. Salt to taste (omit this step if you're using the vegan bigos as the basis for bigos with meat, as you will want to adjust the flavor later.)