If you’ve been eating out on H Street NE lately, you may have noticed an unusual ingredient cropping up on the menus of several restaurants lining the strip: sauerkraut. It’s no coincidence. Kraut Rocks, an unconventional marketing campaign aiming to “change people’s outlook on kraut” has recruited three H St. restaurateurs (along with two others in Chinatown and Old Town Alexandria) to creative innovative kraut-based dishes and feature them throughout September.

“Sauerkraut gets a bad rap because when people hear the buzzword ‘fermented,’ they instantly think ‘rotten,’” says Spike Mendelsohn, a former Top Chef contestant, owner of DC restaurants We the Pizza and Good Stuff Eatery, and now the celebrity force behind the campaign. “What people don’t realize is that we consume things that are fermented on a daily basis: beer, for instance, or pizza dough,” he continues. “The idea of this campaign is to take the fear out of fermenting.”

The five participating chefs were challenged to take sauerkraut beyond the hot dog. Here’s what they came up with:

• Mussels with pork sausage, kraut, fennel, and cream (Chef Teddy Folkman at Granville Moore’s on H Street)
• Pork Belly Rice with Congee and Kraut (Chef Erik Bruner-Yang at Toki Underground on H Street)
• Pork Loin with Kraut and Apples (Chef Ian Reeve at The Queen Vic on H Street)
• Aumoniere (phyllo “purses” stuffed with sausage, kraut, and apples) (Chef Fabrice Reymond at Redline in Chinatown)
• Sauerkraut Scotch Eggs (hard-boiled eggs wrapped in kraut sausage, breaded and deep-fried) (Chef Ryan Wheeler at Virtue Feed & Grain in Old Town Alexandria)

Teddy Folkman, executive chef at Granville Moore’s., experimented with several techniques including smoking the kraut in his backyard (“That was an awful mistake,” Folkman shudders) before settling on the recipe for his kickass Jean Claude Van Damn Those Mussels Are Good! The dish incorporates kraut in three ways: drying the kraut out on a nonstick pan (since the restaurant has no oven and, incidentally, no freezer) before grinding it up with pork sausage, using the kraut juice to deglaze the pan for the pork stock, and pureeing kraut into the cream and beer sauce to thicken it. “It’s our #1 seller on the new menu,” Folkman says. That menu will change come October, however, so curious diners should make their reservations now.

You can vote for your favorite dish, watch how each is prepared, and enter to win prizes like restaurant gift certificates and kraut-themed swag at KrautRocks.com. (Chef Fabrice Reymond’s aumoniere at Redline is currently leading.) The recipes for each dish (plus bonus recipes for Spike Mendelsohn’s own soupe a l’oignon with kraut and Mike Isabella’s pork belly lettuce tacos with kraut slaw) might entice particularly dedicated kraut fans to try making these dishes themselves at home.

Mendelsohn couldn’t say whether his kraut soup would be on the menu at Bearnaise, the new steak frites concept he’s opening on Capitol Hill, but did say that the restaurant should be open for business by the end of the year.