Thursday, May 28, 2009

Pepper Fool appears to know what's up! Sorta...

From a Mid-Americanish guide to pickling and canning, this site has a great basic canning and pickling primer. They appear oblivious to living vinegar or the distinction, perhaps a Heinz generation. There are still a good number of pickling waypoints there for us to consider. And their recipes will be fun to work through, more to come on that!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

pickling in Popular Science

Popular Science has a website for DIY projects and they've published an article on home pickling. They did a good job of covering the important details, in the sense that this article is a good introduction to pickling. They also offered a recipe for pickled ramps (wild leeks), though it's not a pickle like we make. The neat idea included here is using vacuum bags (the heat-sealed kind) to make the anaerobic environment- fill the bag, squeeze out or suck out the air, and heat-seal. We're trying to move away from plastics to avoid BPA and other pollutants but this is an important idea to chew on.

Monday, May 25, 2009

The Gardener & Pickler's Fridge


Sorry about the lighting, this is from my cellphone camera. My sweetie counts thirty-some-odd jars of pickles right now, back behind the local, organically grown produce in there. Barely room for some salame! We're trying to plan a household around numbers that include a separate cooler for pickled stock, seeing as the American Third Coast is a lousy place to site a root cellar. And whatever ain't pickled now, I think I'll be reaching for soon, well, 'cept those peaches, I don't have pickled peaches figured out yet...

Birthday Love Sweet Pepper, completed


This is the Sweet Pepper Birthday Love Batch, right next to my favorite Mister PotatoHead Parts Poacher. The colors show up well here, online, so you can get a good idea of the mix/ratios. The carrot always wears its orange, day in, month out. After that, the serranos and jalapenos show their dark(er) green, alongside red, yellow, and orange bell peppers and my baby's red lips.

Photos, Sweet Pepper Love Batch

We're trying to figure out how to measure the makeup of each batch or jar as we go. It's tricky- there's so much going on during a pickle that it's hard to keep up with little things like how much of what goes where. This is where a camera phone comes in handy: Here's the bulk of the Birthday Love Sweet Pepper Batch, done fermenting 1 June '09..

Birthday Love Pepper Batch

John's birthday was celebrated with both organic and local love this year! Stacey Roussel's polychromatic carrots were added to Brad n Jessica's garden-fresh jalapenos, serranos, and fresno peppers. A couple pounds of sweet red, yellow, and orange lil' bell peppers added bulk and the liquid remains of the last batch of orange relish added garlic, onion, and some inoculants. I'm expecting this batch to be sweet and hot, just like an approachable peck of pickled peppers should be!

Thursday, May 21, 2009

What We're Learning So Far...[updated]

We don't get to pickle as often as we'd like but we're working out some more enduring guidepoints. In no particular order,
- Checklists are handy when you're packing for a pickling off-site. Conversely, each kitchen DOES need its own canning funnel and cheesecloth. Did I say cheesecloth? I mean a nylon napkin from a middling-level restaurant. Cheesecloth is a dodo as long as we've got restaurants!
- Keep ingredients separate through processing and measure as you mix. It's easier to work out recipes and ratios this way. And recipes get useful!
- A kitchen scale is a real easy way to keep tabs on the above. Find one with a tare function, for easy measuring on the fly!
- Basic staples (garlic, onion, peppers (separate hot from sweet, or any special harvests), beets, cabbage, carrots) pickle just fine in their own jars and can be easier to work with post-pickle. Different members of the household love to make their own custom mixes. Sea vegetables especially make this a good rule- we're not liking the way they change cabbage/root mixes. Pureeing is overkill in pickling, grating or shredding is all you need. After the pickle, you can further process stuff for specific needs. Leave some stuff whole, like sm. onions, garlic cloves, or baby beets- these are good for "cocktail," escabiche, or related mixes.
- Cabbage expands. Beet stains. Asparagus delights. Garlic is ALL POWERFUL but still really mellow when whey is used instead of vinegar.
- Whey makes for mellower pickles, an especially nice detail when pickling ginger or garlic. Vinegar works great for power relishes and stuff with a sweet side. Cabbage has its own inoculants, at least more noticeably so than other stuff fresh from the dirt.
- Iodized salt is bad but coarse salt is fine. Pickling needs salt, either way!! Dry veggies want to soak overnight (after chopping) in brine. Brine is saltwater. It's heavier than water, more useful than just keeping putrefaction at bay!
- CO2 production makes batches both float and expand, so you either have to weigh your veggies down or cut your ingredients into spears that you can wedge into place. Spears are a better idea when pickling in jars and sealing with oil, while plates work well weighing things down in a crock. Beet-stained cabbage functopus juice bubbling up out of your jars is quite alarming, especially when the batch is inoculating in someone else's kitchen! It's better to be prepared: Line baking sheets with lots of newspaper and let your jars ferment on this.
- Smaller batches work better in jars, while larger batches work better in a crock. Large (1/2 gallon) jars bridge the gap well. And crocks (fired ceramic, cylindrical pots) can be had in various sizes.
- Jars and crocks both are worth skimming through resale shops for. Reduce, reuse, recycle that picklejar!
- Label and date your batches. Pickled food can last well beyond seven months and many pickles want to age and mellow for a few months. We enjoyed some pickles recently that were over a year old. The space issue makes it easy to envy Koreans who can bury kimchee crocks while they age!