Making your own pickles - Page 3

I love pickles. My absolute favourite are the mini aubergines the lebanese do ("makdous"):



Found this recipe, looks ok. If this thread came up two months ago i would have been able to verify with my grandmother

pickles, the perfect partner to fat laden meat

put in a batch of saurkraut on the weekend. i am trialling a new fermenting crock - i basically got a glass jar with a plastic lid and put a water seal from a home brew kit in the lid. im hoping the void will fill up quickly with CO2 and should avoid any of that floating scumm which ive seen with other saurkraut batches.

I'm interested in pickling and looking for advice.

I want to get all my hardware in order. I would like to get a set of jars that are very thick and durable. If I get into this seriously, I would hope I can keep caned goods around for a very long time. My grandmother once opened a family jar of picked that was over 100 years old. I'll start off with cucumber and asparagus.

Any recs for jars? I vaguely remember some old bit on NPR about different companies trying to change the size of their jar lids so they were non-standardized, forcing people to buy accessories from this particular company or that.

I am gonna post up my quick pickle recipe once I make it and document the process - and then try the results to make sure i got it right. haven't done it in awhile but it's really speedy and the results have been good in the past.

Alright, just made some pickles using my quick method; it's fairly foolproof and you gain a lot more control, but to be sure these are not true fermented pickles, they're fridge pickles in the vein of some Indian pickles or something like that. Very sour and full of dill, garlic and spice, lacking a bit of mellow finesse that real fermented pickles done the slow way have, but the texture of your veggies can remain good this way and these are very easy, from start to finish, about 20 minutes, and they're ready to eat later in the day. You need: -pickling veggies - beyond pickling cucumbers, I like carrots, celery, green, red and yellow peppers, cauliflower, pearl onions, green beans, others you can do are blanched/peeled cherry tomatoes (very intensely sour), hot peppers, shishito peppers, etc, etc -dill -pickling spices: coriander seeds, black peppercorns, cloves, mustard seed, cinnamon stick bits, a bit of fennel -bay leaves -small dried whole Italian red chilies (peperoncino intero) or the type of red pepper flake you put on pizza, etc -garlic cloves, a few -salt and sugar -a cheap bottle of white table wine -a bottle of brown rice vinegar 1. Clean and trim vegetables, arrange in jars with dill 2. Heat wine over gentle heat, add all spices, bay leaves, lightly chopped garlic cloves, dried red chilies 3. For 700mL of wine, add about 400-450mL of rice vinegar, that's almost the whole bottle in most of the Asian plastic vinegar bottles. 4. salt and sugar to taste, it should be sour but not off-putting; this is a pickle brine, after all, so 3-4 heaping Tbsp of each, at the very least, maybe more sugar than that depending on your taste 5. bring brine to a light boil; ladle over packed jars, let sit on counter for awhile to cool down, and then refrigerate until fully cold. Ready to eat from there.

your own taste on the salt, I guess. I like them salty and I didn't really measure that. I have a huge bag of fleur de sel that I was tipping in as I stirred the brine. I did a taste of them last night and they turned out pretty good though. My recipe is just quick vinegar pickles, so no need to ferment, IMO, the vinegar and wine are just ways around that. It's to have pickles on the table the same day. I'd ferment pickles the right way, but i just don't have the space or kitchen to do that in.

My mom makes great pickles (very basic recipe of some white vinegar, a lots of dill, and some garlic, salt, pepper) and really good pickled peppers. I was going to try my hand at her recipes this year but unfortunately deer got into my garden early and often and destroyed my crop. Oh well, at least she had a bumper harvest this year and now I know I will need a fence around my little garden plots next summer.

Found lot of pickle recipes and even oil free lemon pickles here.Hope it will help you.
http://padhuskitchen.blogspot.com/20...varieties.html

Those sound ridiculous. I'm gonna have to try them.

Sorry about your grandmother. Nobody ever cooks like grandmothers do.

For refrigerator pickles, what's the difference between cooking the vegetable very slightly in the liquid versus pouring the hot liquid over cold vegetables?

I have a radish I'm working on, which is a bit hardier than cucumbers. Wondering if they will go mushy?

anyone have any luck with colouring the pickles?

im putting in a batch of cauliflower pieces and am using some safron to dye them. are there any other natural colourings you can use to make them more interesting?

beets? cumin? paprika(not nearly as hot as it looks)