Any picklers?

Has anybody out there tried pickling produce? I'm curious to hear what the results were, want to do something with all the farmers market produce during peak season this summer.

Check out Cathy2's post, "The Romance of Canning".

Wonderful stuff from Cathy...but not too much on successes with pickling. I've heard quick-pickling fruits and veggies can produce good results for pairing with cheeses. Any ideas?

missmonica wrote:Has anybody out there tried pickling produce? I'm curious to hear what the results were, want to do something with all the farmers market produce during peak season this summer.

I make dill pickles every once in awhile. The basic recipe is to make a brine in the ratio 1 L water:1 heaping tablespoon salt. (Please use non-iodized salt like kosher or pickling salt). Boil the brine. Let it cool off for five to ten minutes.

Prepare your pickles by cutting a half inch or so off the ends. You can also lightly score the skin lengthwise, if you wish. You want pickling cucumbers about six inches or so, about two inches thick, not those long cucumbers.

Get yourself a big ol' glass jar, 1/2 to 1 gallon. Clean it very thoroughly. (I use a little bleach and then rinse it very well.) On the bottom of the jar, place some fresh, preferably flowering, dill. (Dill that looks like this.)Also, put a couple cloves of garlic. If you happen to have access to sour cherry leaves, those are nice, too, as is a little horseradish root.
Put down one layer of cucumbers. Put another layer of herbs & garlic, and fill with cucumbers to the top, leaving about an inch or two of room on the top.

Fill the jar with the warm brine, covering the cucumbers, but leaving an inch or two of headspace from the top of the jar. Top with two slices of rye bread (I just use whatever Polish rye is lying around the house). Cover top with a dish, and put out in the sun for 2-4 days.

The liquid should bubble after a day or so, as it begins to ferment and sour. It should not get moldy. If it does, you've done something wrong and should start again. How long you leave it in the sun is up to your taste and how quickly your pickles ferment (based on the temperature). When your pickles are satisfyingly sour, take them in, pour off, strain, and reserve the brine. Portion your pickles into jars, pour over the brine, and refrigerate.

Okay...Polish rye bread at the top and sour cherry leaves at the bottom. Interesting alchemy! What do the two ingredients contribute?

missmonica wrote:Okay...Polish rye bread at the top and sour cherry leaves at the bottom. Interesting alchemy! What do the two ingredients contribute?

Sour cherry leaves is flavor, like bay leaves. The rye bread I believe helps the fermentation process along.

I've made pickled beets before with great success. Care for the recipe?

Traditionally grape leaves are added to some pickling brines to help keep the vegetables crisp. I wonder if this is how your cherry leaves originally found their way into the recipe.

Just to clarify one thing regarding mold: you will definitely get scum building on the top of the water. This isn't mold and isn't a bad thing. Check your fermenting vegetables everyday and skim any scum from the top.

Alton Brown, in his Good Eats episode, advocates using filtered water to minimize the chlorine, which will kill the bacteria (which we don't want to happen). He also suggests using filtered water to clean the spoon as you skim the scum. I presume Binko's method of boiling the water is also to remove the chlorine.

My go-to book for pickling is The Joy of Pickling.

I also rely on my Time Life series a lot, and the book on Preservinghas a nice section on pickling.

missmonica wrote:Okay...Polish rye bread at the top and sour cherry leaves at the bottom. Interesting alchemy! What do the two ingredients contribute?

missmonica - i like you. May you have an extraordinary pickling experience, please do report your findings!

Darren--You mean clean the spoon with filtered water before you put it in the vat to skim the scum? To ensure there's no chlorine or some such on the spoon?

Pickled Beets person--yes, I would love to see your pickled beet recipe!
Thanks very much

missmonica wrote:Darren--You mean clean the spoon with filtered water before you put it in the vat to skim the scum? To ensure there's no chlorine or some such on the spoon?

Yes, sort of. The idea is that you use the spoon to skim off scum, then rinse the spoon in a bowl of filtered water and skim again; repeat until the scum is gone. Alton's idea is that you shouldn't rinse with tap water and then put the spoon in the pickles.

I pickle in a whole different way. When the garden produce comes flowing in I chop up all the veggies and boil them for a short time in white vinegar. I put the entire result in glass jars, and they keep on my kitchen countertop for up to a year.

missmonica wrote:Wonderful stuff from Cathy...but not too much on successes with pickling. I've heard quick-pickling fruits and veggies can produce good results for pairing with cheeses. Any ideas?

"NOt too much success with pickling," you sort of jump to conclusions.

Last year I didn't make any pickles because my local pickle vendor didn't like the crop. The National Center for Food Preservation has quite a few reference articles on pickles. I am so far the only person I know who uses Pasteurization (where permitted) when processing my fermented and bread-and-butter pickles. The effort is rewarded with pickles that are still fairly crunchy. I have made 14-day pickles, various types of bread and butter pickles, pickled green beans, pickled beets, pickled cherries, fermented pickles and sauerkraut.

While I have a number of books with pickle recipes, I will use them for interesting spice, fruit and vegetable combinations. However, I will adjust the recipes for fruit/vegetable to acid-sugar ratios used in the USDA references. Especially important with vegetables, because a low acid environment and water bath canning is just asking for trouble.

Cook's Illustrated many years back had an article on making small batches of pickled-type foods using lower acid rice vinegar rathen than 5% white vinegar. The idea was to replicate how a pickled food tasted after 5-6 weeks from initial processing. The pickled food-acid interaction is far sharper if eaten earlier than 5-6 weeks in conventionally pickled products.

Regards,

Darren72 wrote:Traditionally grape leaves are added to some pickling brines to help keep the vegetables crisp. I wonder if this is how your cherry leaves originally found their way into the recipe.

You know, I think you're right. I just assumed they were for flavor, and I don't use them very often as I don't have access to cherry leaves, but looking online, there was somebody who mentioned using cherry, black currant, or grape leaves, for the purpose of helping keeping the pickles crunchy. Interesting. I only do my pickles as half-sours, so the texture is relatively crunchy as is, but it'd be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison of pickles with and without the leaves.

Darren72 wrote: Alton's idea is that you shouldn't rinse with tap water and then put the spoon in the pickles.

I think Alton is being a little paranoid in this regard. The chlorine in municipal tap water is not going to kill the yeasts in a batch of pickles. I have sourdough starters that are fed with flour and Chicago tap water, and they're still healthy and bubbly.

Cathy2,
Not conclusion jumping--only meant that that particular blog strand about the summer canning adventure didn't talk much about your successes with pickling, which I was hoping to hear more about. Thanks for the new post which gives more info. I appreciate the resource sharing.
Monica

I purchased the Harsch fermenting crock http://www.simply-natural.biz/Harsch-Crock-Pot.php last fall in the 15 liter size. A trip to a wholesale suppplier yielded a crate of Mexican pickles(this was December), about 1/2 were crocked and the rest that didn't fit were processed. The crocked pickles were a salt pickle with whey for a starter and have turned out excellent. Since the crock is in the basement, fermentation temperature was lower than reccamended but that only increased the time required, by February we had beautiful pickles. The water seal on the Harsch means no skimming or any type of maintanance except for keeping the seal filled with water.-Dick

Last year pickled: four bean salad and green tomatoes...actually, tho' I wouldn't try it on a dare, there's a half bottle of leftover green tomato pickle from Thanksgiving dinner out in the catering kitchen. It's remained "visibly" pristine such that I've left it just to see how long it'll be before it "looks" turned. Again, it passed it's due date a week or so after opening...and now it's the end of April. But, that was last years project...learnin' myself home canning...I freeze things each year, but have never had until recently the space to "put anything up." Funny, cuz when I'm making tomato sauce, etc or salsa verde...I have to remind myself to open a home jar instead of one of the cans in the cupboard.

I wish I was brave enough to can food. I'm too afraid I'd mess up & kill somebody, namely me.

Liz in Norwood Park wrote:I wish I was brave enough to can food. I'm too afraid I'd mess up & kill somebody, namely me.

There's always the fear of mass death

But, if you follow the gubment guidelines and "hotpack" then cook your products upon opening for the rec. 10 min or so...you should kill off any nascent botulism...

I was concerned about all this "cooking," afraid I'd lose the subtleties of my veggies, however, I found no discernible degradation in flavor integrity...

for my salsas I cook after opening for the recommended then let come to room temp. or chill

I make half-sour pickles with delicious success. Recipe on request. The role of grape leaves is various, but at least in part they contribute oxalic acid, which is an aide to crunchiness.

Geo

Just finished up a jar of pickled carrot sticks, made from a recipe you can find on Smitten Kitchen at http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/01/pickled-carrot-sticks/. The recipe on the site was itself adapted from Gourmet magazine.

The result? Well, I'm a pickle fiend having a love affair with vinegar, so I'd eat most anything that came from a brine. But they were good. Interestingly garlicky (I used double the garlic, cause why not?) and sour but also sweet, both from the carrots themselves and the sugar in the brine. I ate one, and wasn't sure how I liked them, but then ate another, and another, and then the whole jar in about a week, so take that as you will.

Please do post your recipes, cybermud and Geo.

If you can't add grape leaves (or sour cherry) for crispness, the alternative is powdered alum.

The pickles that get made most often in our house are cornichons (when I can find cucumbers tiny enough), sunomono and other Japanese-style pickles, and a few other refrigerator types. I make dills now and then, more or less as Binko describes.

I note that you don't have to cut off the stem end off the cukes, but be sure to cut the blossom end.

Pickle making would have to be severely botched to result in mass death -- the most likely failure is moldiness. Fermented and vinegared foods tend to fail in obvious ways that would cause anyone to discard the results. Ditto jams and jellies.

The risk of undetectable botulism lies in plainer canned foods.

Anyway, anyone can make refrigerator pickles, with no risk. Here's one for Italian pickled zucchini.