Daikon and carrot pickles

Using a recipe from the NY Times and a recipe from Epicurious, I made some daikon and carrot pickles tonight. Very simple and good. The daikon is still a little bitter, but the sugar and salt helps cut that.

2 medium carrots, peeled and cut into 2 inch matchsticks
2 medium daikons, peeled and cut into 2 inch matchsticks
½ cup rice vinegar
2 tsp. + ¼ cup sugar
1 tsp. salt

Sprinkle the vegetables with salt and 2 tsp. sugar.  Let sit for 10 minutes, then drain, rinse, and drain again.  Dissolve the ¼ cup sugar in the rice vinegar, and pour over vegetables.  It's good right away, better after it sits for a while.

The Pickle Guys

I had no idea there was a pickle district in Manhattan!  A story on NPR tonight about The Pickle Guys made me want to go there sometime soon.

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Easy Garlic Dill Pickles

Making pickles with our surplus of cucumbers. I decided to try a lightly fermented half-sour recipe. I used about 2 lbs. of cucumbers, and salted them for an hour or so first to crisp up. They ended up a little salty, I should have reduced the salt in the brine slightly. Otherwise very good, though.

For pickling spice, I used a recipe from Quick Pickles: 1 tbl. coriander seed, 1 tbl. mustard seed, 2 tsp. celery seed, 2 tsp. peppercorns. 2 whole cloves, and 4 crumbled bay leaves.

Easy Garlic Dill Pickles
Large glass jar (½ gallon with screw lid)
Cucumbers to fill above jar – ideally as close to the same size as possible
1 tsp pickling spice
¼ cup kosher salt
3-5 garlic cloves
Bunch of dill
1 slice rye bread with seeds

Wash jar well. Pack cucumbers in bottom of jar as tightly as possible. Pour in salt; shove in garlic cloves and some of the dill. Fill rest of jar with cucumbers. Squeeze rest of dill around cucumbers.

Pour boiling water into jar, almost to top. Cover jar and shake to dissolve salt. Open lid and put slice of rye bread inside top of jar. Move jar to sink. Pour boiling water into jar until it spills over. Screw top on tightly.

Put jar in stainless steel bowl to allow for seepage. Set it in a sunny window for 3-4 days. You will have half-sour dills by that time.

Refrigerate – they will continue to pickle in the refrigerator. Enjoy through the winter, if they last that long in your house.

Printed in the Honey Brook Organic Farm weekly member's email, from a member who said, "This recipe comes from my father’s second wife, Florence, who made them a new family tradition (after I was long out of the house). I asked her how she made them the last time we had a bumper crop of cucumbers."

Sauerkraut

About ¾ head of cabbage, over 3½ weeks, made 3 pints of sauerkraut. This is truly mysterious biochemistry with food. As I understand it, you just control the salinity of the solution, keep it out of contact with oxygen, and maintain a reasonable temperature range, and the right bacteria (Leuconostoc mesenteroides) will win. And it seems to have worked - I just put some cabbage and salt water in the basement for a few weeks, and it tastes like sauerkraut, so it definitely fermented, and presumably the good bacteria won. I canned a couple pints and kept one for the fridge.

See a recipe, and look up the science in On Food and Cooking.

Japanese curry

There was an article about Japanese curry in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. It's got a recipe, but that's a lot of work since I can buy pints of curry sauce to bring home directly from Go Go Curry on 38th Street in Manhattan.

I am interested, though, in trying to make something like the red pickles they serve as a side dish at Go Go Curry: fukuzinzuke. A Google search doesn't come up with many recipes, but this one is simple and promising, and this one looks interesting. We've got two daikons to use still, even after I made the Korean pickles from Quick Pickles.

Pickled beets

With another batch of beets today, it was time to pickle them. Canned 6 half-pint jars, plus part of a pint jar for the fridge, using the USDA recipe. Made cold beet borscht with the cooking water, although I got the proportions off a bit and it was waterier than usual.

Bread and Butter Pickles

This was our first try at real, canned pickles. I've been a fan of making quick pickles for a while, and made a big batch of bread & butter pickles each of the last couple summers, but I always had a big jar of them that ended up taking up too much space in the fridge and hanging around too long. Since we started canning jams recently, I thought I'd try making some pickles to put up as well. The cucumbers and onions were all from our weekly CSA share.

We canned four pint jars, and had about ½ a pint left to refrigerate, which we tried today. They're pretty good, and crunchy - I had been afraid that they might not hold up as well to cooking, but they seemed fine.

Bread-and-Butter Pickles
about five 1-pint jars

Wash, then slice ⅛ inch from the ends of:
2½ pounds pickling cucumbers
Cut crosswise into ¼-inch thick slices. Peel, then cut the same way:
1 pound 2- to 2½-inch onions, preferably red
Combine the cucumbers and onions in a large bowl along with:
3 tbl. salt
Mix well to dissolve the salt. Cover with a clean wet towel, then top with 2 inches of ice. Refrigerate for 3 to 4 hours. Discard the ice; drain the vegetables, rinse, and drain again. Combine in a 4-quart or larger saucepan:
2 cups white vinegar
2 cups sugar
1 tbl. mustard seeds
1 tsp. red pepper flakes (optional)
¾ tsp. celery seeds
¾ tsp. ground turmeric
¼ tsp. ground cloves
Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Cook uncovered until the syrup boils. Add the vegetables, stir to mix, and continue to heat until the syrup just begins to boil. Using a slotted spoon, pack the hot slices into hot pint jars and then add the hot syrup. Leave ½-inch headspace and process in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes.

From The Joy of Cooking: All about Canning and Preserving