Pickles--Cook-Off 32

[Peter the eater]

The garden produced some nice onions, peppers and tomatoes this year. Today I made a batch of pickled hot orange peppers with garlic and onion. With all the big red and green bell peppers I'm thinking of roasting, peeling and preserving in oil. We'll see . . .

[Chris Amirault]

Darren72, I hope someone answers your question. I'm very curious to know the answer.

Meanwhile, I harvested a few dozen thai chili peppers and made Lora's fermented chili paste recipe:

Last summer I made a fermented chile paste (lactobacillus fermentation, same method that makes sauerkraut and sour dills).

I threw some Thai chiles, red bell peppers (to cut the heat a little), ginger, garlic, and salt in the food processor. Then I added a little liquid drained from yogurt, to get a lactobacillus culture started. I jarred it and set it on the counter to culture. I started eating it about two weeks later.

I've still got a jar left and I know it won't last nearly until new chiles start to come in this summer. It's so good it makes me cry (or that could just be the tongue-searing heat).

I folllowed those directions, adding a bit of simple syrup and vinegar to cover. Very eager to see what happens!

[DanM]

I currently have 4 lbs of pickling cukes in my crock. This is my second attempt at cukes. My first crashed and burned big time. This batch is looking much better. My basic brine is:

1 gallon of water

5.5 oz (by weight) of kosher salt

.25 c of pickling spices from The Spice House. That Stuff

4 lbs of cukes.

I hope they are ready early next week for canning.

Dan

[snowangel]

Pickled green beans. I have a plethora of beans. I want them somewhat spicy (read hot). Whole cloves of garlic? Peppers. Whole birds or crushed dried? Dill? Not to be found fresh anywhere, so seeds?

Advice sought.

[ilikefood]

Snowangel -

Although I am very new to pickleing, I would vote to use the whole garlic and peppers. You can always eat the pickled garlic and peppers when the beans are pickled.

[ilikefood]

Meanwhile, I harvested a few dozen thai chili peppers and made Lora's fermented chili paste recipe:

How did the chili paste turn out? I am thinking of making some with some bhut jolokia peppers my dad grew. I think I have a death wish

[Chris Amirault]

It's good, still a little raw. I added too much ginger, I think. Didn't measure stuff out, stupidly.

[Pilori]

It's good, still a little raw. I added too much ginger, I think. Didn't measure stuff out, stupidly.

I was wondering if you need to sterilize (i.e. boil) the jars after you add everything if you're going to sit them on the counter for 2 weeks?

[iguana]

Thanks for bumping this thread. I read this thread last spring and ordered Quick Pickles on the basis of multiple recommendations upthread. I had a very busy pickling summer, but forgot to post any of it.

The Green Tomato Pickles from Quick Pickles, but using the Spice House pickling spice blend:

And ready to eat:

Sauerkraut:

And bread-and-butter pickles, again with the Spice House blend:

One jar has hot peppers, just for kicks.

We are a family of 3, but subscribe to a weekly CSA box that gives us about a half-bushel of veg every week. This forces me to eat my veg, and gives me the opportunity to pickle a lot. It is really wonderful to be delving into summer's pickles in the middle of winter. I just finished the last of the green tomatoes a couple of weeks ago and then opened the bread and butter pickles-- I find they really need to mellow for several months to lose their harshness. The sauerkraut is starting to get a little old, so I need to make a big batch of pierogies soon.

Next year, more pickles!!

Cheers, Jen

[nickrey]

Our greengrocer had some small pickling cucumbers and, well, you know the rest. I just had to buy some to try pickling them!

Washed the cucumbers and packed them into a sterilised jar.

Then I made the brine, which was 10% by weight Sicilian Sea Salt in an Australian White Wine Vinegar. Added some yellow mustard seeds, black peppercorns, crushed dried bay leaves and two sliced cloves of garlic. Heated this mixture up until just below boiling and then poured it over the cucumbers. They will sit in the cupboard for a few months before I try them. Can't wait.

Here they are:

Edited March 28, 2010 by nickrey (log)

[Chris Amirault]

We are approaching full-on pickle season, and I've got my training wheels off. Made oi kimchi and simple daikon pickles from David Chang's Momofuku Cookbook and Sichuan long beans from Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty yesterday. Surely I'm not alone in anticipating the pickling frenzy north of the hemisphere....

[vice]

I'm curious what folks are doing for white wine vinegar. Often, what's cheap and voluminous enough to be practical for pickling is truly wretched. Any tips?

[nakji]

I usually use rice vinegar. It's mild and cheap where I live. Of course, you could always try to make your own:

Making vinegar topic

Making wine vinegar topic

[Shelby]

It's that time of year, again.

I have a bowl of pickles in brine as we speak.

I need some help, though.

Due to the scorching heat there is not a sprig of fresh dill to be found. Ideas anyone? I can't make my pickles without it. Well, I could, but I don't want to.

[PopsicleToze]

Shelby, I have a recipe I'm dying to try, but I couldn't find any dill either. I'm going to town tomorrow, so I hope to find some there. Meanwhile, I went ahead and made bread and butter pickles today. The cucumbers were really big, but they looked good, and they were pickling cucumbers and hadn't been waxed.

Had to salt them for 3 hours.

The pickling liquid and spices before bringing to a boil.

Mix them together.

Remove from fire just before they come back to a boil.

And pickles...

[Shelby]

Beautiful, Rhonda!

I hope you found some dill. I finally ran across some at the Asian market that is about an hour away from me.

[OliverB]

I think this might be a good place to ask: Our local safeway sells some wonderful pickled (I think) garlic at their olive bars. Whole cloves, thick and plump and almost snow white, very crunchy. Garlic being a problematic thing to "put up", I'm wondering if anybody here has an idea how to make this? Might not be worth the labor, but I'm still curious. The cloves have a very fresh crunchy mouthfeel, almost crunchier than fresh garlic by itself, they are white all the way through and stored in some kind of vinegar solution I think. Very tasty, try them if your Safeway has an olive bar! They also add some small red hot peppers, I usually leave those for others and just take garlic :-)

I don't have any at hand right now, or I'd add a photo.

As for pickles I love to make, the Zuni Caffee pickled zucchini are absolutely wonderful and pretty easy to make. You have to store them in the fridge. Also their pickled red onions are fantastic, but more work since you have to heat/cool them several times to make sure they stay crunchy. We'll worth the effort though. The whole books is wonderful by the way :-)

[PopsicleToze]

Garlic being a problematic thing to "put up", I'm wondering if anybody here has an idea how to make this?

I didn't know that. Why is it problematic to put up? I checked my Stocking Up canning reference, and the peeled cloves are only preserved by a hot water bath, not even a pressure cooker. I know garlic put in vinegars and even chopped and put in olive oil, not properly processed is a problem, but I've never heard pickled garlic is a problem. I hope someone enlightens me because I am sooooo in the pickling frame of mind and want to do some garlic, and then some pickled green beans with garlic, too, but I don't want to kill anyone with my cooking... at least not this week

[OliverB]

well, I might have worded it wrong, but garlic is something to be careful with, because of botulism. Maybe they put these in a hot bath, but they are very uncooked in texture, very crisp and crunchy. More than a good pickle actually. Which makes me wonder if any heat was applied, or if they use some other process to make it safe. The olive bar is open to the air as well, chilled from underneath I'd guess, but not very cold.

[Kouign Aman]

As I was cutting up a watermelon, I happened to mention to the munchkin that people sometimes pickle watermelon rind.

Well, asked said munchkin, then why dont we?

Realizing that answering that would take longer than making the pickle, I dug out the recipe from my 1972 Joy of Cooking.

I was surprised to find it is a sweet pickle. The book called for 7:2 sugar volume to vinegar volume. I changed that to ~ 5:2. We added a pinch of cinnamon for that is one of the variants suggested in the recipe. For the fun and the pretty of it, we left a bit of the melon attached to the rind. The process was easy: boil the syrup and pour over the rind. Pour off and boil the syrup and pour it back over the rind the next day. Repeat on the third day and you're done.

The pickles were unexpectedly toothsome. We preferred the very thinly sliced bits,and even tho the red looks lovely, we preferred the crisp snap of the rind to the soggy leathery flesh.

If ever we do this again, we'll try without the sugar at all.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

*Bump*

Yesterday was a festival of pickling down here - not only was dill available at the Monday market (yay!) but I also found the caselot sellers of cucumbers (double yay! The smallholder sellers charge 25-30 cents per cukes, but the caselots are closer to 10 cents). Unlike the rest of you lucky ducks, I can't buy pickling type cukes, which has led me to be inventive. So here's my entry: kosher-dill style sliced English cucumber pickles.

I don't have any thrilling procedural photos (I was up to my elbows in cukes and my hands were covered in chorophyll and juiciness) but here are the finished jars. My process is to wash the cukes, then use my citrus zesting tool to peel away strips of the rind down the length of the cukes (5-6 stripes around the cukes). Then sliced finely and quick-brined in very salty water for about an hour. Packed into hot jars with sterilized garlic (1 clove per), coriander (1 TBSP), kosher salt (1 TBSP), and chopped dill (1/4 oz), then topped with vinegar and sealed in boiling water bath for 25 minutes (as reccomended by the INEN norms for hot-canning at my altitude). 500 mL jars seem to hold about 8 oz of sliced cukes.

I got 32 jars of 500 mL, and one giant 2 L catering jar out of a sack of 32 large cukes, and 50 cents worth of dill. These are among my favourite pickles - I wouldn't have expected that slicing cukes would be tasty done in this way (I was taught that they're not for pickling, ever) but they're simply scrumptious and they're the first thing I reach for when making sandwiches.

[Chris Hennes]

One of the more appealing aspects of canning is the row upon row of neatly-ordered jars you wind up with in the end. I'm sure the pickles are good, too!

[DanM]

I picked up about 2 lbs of thumb size baby cucumbers at the farmer's market. I plan on pickling them, but I am not sure if I should brine them in my crock or if I should use vinegar. Any thoughts?

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Why not do both? Split them into 1 lb batches and compare, to see which method you like best in terms of final flavour.

[DanM]

Why not do both? Split them into 1 lb batches and compare, to see which method you like best in terms of final flavour.

Good idea. I made brined pickles today and will try to get more next Sunday for a quick pickle.