Do you go to La Boulange so you can sneakily pick at their pickle bar? I do. And I also drink pickle juice straight from the jar and even white vinegar from the bottle. (Don’t judge, I know I am not alone here.)
Todd Parsons Photography
Skip the line at La Boulange and make your own! Besides, pickles don’t have to be boring. They can be wild in color. Spicy. Sweet. Fermented. Bursting with vinegar, juicy goodness, and probiotic power. And they make a beautiful appetizer. And they go well with aperitifs. Suzie Trexler, co-farm manager at Potrero Nuevo Farm with her husband Jay, and master canner and pickler has some recipes to share. Or rather, I have some of her recipes to share.
For our farm to table dinner with Cypress Brewing Company we wanted to have an array of little bites that would pair well with Brian and Lea’s locally brewed beer. Using produce only grown at Potrero Nuevo Farm Suzie made an assortment of fresh and fermented pickles – kraut, and kimchi too.
Guests were greeted with an ice cold pint of beer and a selection of colorful goodies to nibble on.
Fresh pickles will keep in the fridge up to two weeks and can be made by pouring boiling pickling liquid (vinegar, water, salt, and spices) over cleaned and trimmed produce. Allow the veg to cool in the pickling liquid to room temperature and then refrigerating in an air tight container.
Sour pickles, krauts, and kimchis are fermented providing probiotics and many health benefits. Fermented foods especially cabbage ones like sauerkraut and kimchi can boost the immune system, fight various types of cancer, and aid in weight loss by regenerating good bacteria in the intestines.
For Suzie’s fermented items she uses German ceramic crocks. She places weights over the vegetables and enough brine so air and bad pathogens cannot spoil the produce and the lacto-fermentation process can take place.
The sour taste of kimchi, sauerkraut, and what are aptly named ‘sour’ pickles does not come from vinegar – it comes from beneficial bacteria metabolizing the vegetable’s natural sugars and producing lactic acid as a byproduct. Spices, sea salt, and water are all that Suzie adds in the pickling solution for her fermented concoctions. (more on this in a future post – I’m fascinated by fermentating and it deserves its own column).
The pickle bar: Todd Parsons Photography
As healthy as fermented pickles are, not all of us have the time to make them – or to wait for them to burp and bubble and do their thing – sometimes fresh pickles make a nice quick alternative to a crudité plate or as an accompaniment to a hearty terrine paysanne or chacuterie plate. I also like to add them to salads, especially ones that have fruit because I think the sweet and sour surprise is tasty.
With a basic brine recipe Suzie experiments with different spices and traditional additions for taste and color. Pictured below is her spicy pickled cauliflower florets with tumeric, coriander, cumin, garlic, and chili peppers.
Here’s a basic pickling liquid for fresh pickles (not preserved in any way). Taste and adjust to your liking. And remember if you like the flavor of the pickling liquid you will like the taste of your pickles.
A nice tangy app always get the salivary glands and the conversation started. Why not experiment and add some color to this Thanksgiving’s appetizer array? And then guests can tell people: “Boy, did I get pickled last night….”
Ingredients
- 1 cup apple cider vinegar
- 3/4's cup water
- 1-2 tablespoons sea salt (should taste salty like the sea, adjust with vinegar to right salinity)
- 1/3 cup organic sugar (optional, depends if you would like the pickle brine salty-sweet.)
- 2 pounds of vegetables cleaned and trimmed
- Vegetable choices could be: baby tokyo turnips, cauliflower florets, onions, carrots slices or baby carrots, fresh beans, jalapenos, cucumber slices, zucchini spears, etc...
Bring the vinegar, water, and salt to a boil. Add sugar if desired to create a tart-sweet pickle. Add desired spices (see below for basic options). Pack raw vegetables into glass jars or a plastic container and pour liquid over. Allow to cool to room temperature and then refrigerate.
It is important to either pack the vegetables into a mason jar tight so they will not rise to the top too easily or to submerge them in a plastic container with a weight or plate on top.
Fresh pickles should keep up to two weeks in the refrigerator.
For curried pickles add a half teaspoon each of cumin seed, coriander seed, and tumeric powder (for yellow color). If possible add a few curry leaves (you can also add curry powder which often is a combination of the spices listed above), and a dried red chile.
For a sweeter spice curried pickle make sure to add all the ingredients above plus the sugar, a few slices of young ginger and 2 to 3 cardamon pods. 1 star anise seed is enough to depart it's powerful licorice flavor.
For pink pickles replace the 1 cup of water with 1 cup of beet juice which can be the canning liquid taken from canned beets or from simmering beets in water and then straining the liquid.
The addition of grape or cherry leaves is said to keep the pickles crunchy. I have no proof that this works, but it looks pretty in the jar. It is probably more useful when canning pickles in a water bath where they are cooked.
Spices to consider and experiment with: cumin, coriander, mustard seed, celery seed, star anise, dill flowers, horseradish leaves, celery leaves, garlic.
Note: This recipe is not meant for canned pickles, this is for fresh pickles....
First of all, those Tokyo turnips are beautiful. Ditto the cauliflower though I have this perverse urge to make a batch that’s fluorescent Magic Marker yellow.
Good timing yet again on this post. I just did my canning (steam ovens are great) a have been playing around with Japanese pickles (tsukemono), but most of those don’t ferment with vinegar bases. However it’s time to start gearing up for the Xmas rush and an interesting pickle or several will help cut the lean eating sensation that is porchetta.
I find it interesting that her kimchi doesn’t have a fish component (not sure but I think oysters are traditional) to boost the umami, but it sounds like her process works and works well so we need photos! And hopefully you’ll discuss the cucumber pickles at some point too.
I also bought a vinegar that you might find interesting as an ingredient and a tipple: it’s an apple cider vinegar (big whoop, right?) that’s been aged for 12 years in oak barrels.
Wattacetti, First of all, I love the porchetta idea for Christmas – I’m going to copy you – hope you don’t mind?
What are tsukemono pickles?!?!? As for for the kimchi, I don’t know if Suzie puts a fish component in. I’ll have to ask her. She probably does because the taste is authentic (at least to my palette, which is not saying much).
I will have to try this oak barrel aged apple vinegar! I recently discoverd a brand here in the U.S. called ‘O’ that does a HoneyCrisp Apple vinegar that is so darned good I really do drink it straight from the bottle and ii is barrel aged too – and expensive.
I should also mention, to anyone who’s reading this that the salt and sugar amounts of any pickling brine should be adjusted depending on the strength and sweetness of the vinegar….
Ah! I see that there is already a request that you produce additional pickled products.
I am hoping that someone will at least take a photo of your Xmas porchetta so that the rest of us can see it, seeing as you’re having the turkey talk as I type this.
Tsukemono is just a generic term for pickles in Japanese: among others, there are ones pickled in a bed of rice bran (my favorite but the bran smells horrible), pickled in salt, pickled in umeboshi vinegar (expensive!), and pickled in miso. That last one is for really hard vegetables and you’d have to be ready to wait a couple of months before the pickes come out.
Honey Crisp cider vinegar? Wow – we’re having difficulty getting good Honey Crisp apples. Definitely not available up here but I’ll see if I can get my East Coast source to bring some up.
I had a lot of fun putting that pickle bar together. There are hundreds of versions of kimchi, and the recipe I followed came from “Wild Fermentation” by Sandor Katz and did not have any fish sauce or oysters or any fishy component whatsoever. But you’re right that a lot of kimchi recipes do! I’d like to try this and think it would add a lot to the flavor profile.
To add to this thread, I love the kimchi description given by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall in “Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen,” “The most important spices are fresh and powdered hot red peppers, which give the kimchi its biting zest and help seal in its freshness, and crushed garlic and green onions, which enhance its flavor and help to sterilize it. Additional flavor-builders may include ginger, fruits, nuts, and seafood such as salted live baby shrimp, or even octopus and squid. Green seaweed, chonggak, may be added to help retain freshness; in the mountainous region of the northern provinces, where seafood is not available, beef broth is used instead.” So many possibilities! The nice thing about kimchi is it’s a quick ferment and can finish at 5 days! My sauerkraut batches usually go for 3 weeks at least, so this means it’s much easier to recipe test!
How very cool. I’m preparing some pickles based on your recipe in anticipation of Saturnalia (Xmas) because I need something to help offset turkey and porchetta.
We had Korean neighbors years ago and they made three “classes” of kimchee: a quick-ferment which I think took about a week or so, and a longer ferment of more than a month which they sometimes buried in their back yard if they were making a really large batch.
If I recall, theirs had small dried shrimp, primarily because octopi and really good-quality fresh shrimp wasn’t really available in Alberta back then.
I’m looking forward to Amy presenting your kimchee in some of her food.
Please start making more of these for our bar 🙂
My mother and grandmother used to make dill pickles in a big plastic trash can when I was a kid. I remember them adding “enough salt to float an egg” in the HUGE tub of water and an armload of dill. I also remember the soft little “pop…pop.pop..pop” sounds of the jar lids in the dozens of Mason jar boxes under my bed. I really like a well made dill pickle. Not too big on the sweeter ones, usually.
However, when I’m really craving a vinegar hit, I head to this awful chain of what can only be described as “Okie-Mex” restaurants in my area. Besides their beans and salsa bar, there is little to like there, except the king of vinaigrette dressings. It’s made of cheap ingredients, I’m certain it’s just Cisco crap. But they put crack in it, or something, but it is much thinner/lighter than the standard vinegar to oil ratio. They serve it on shredded iceberg in a little paper cup and it comes with every meal. It wilts the lettuce a little and it’s kind of like some crazy slaw. But taken as a whole, it’s bright and fresh and I’m really glad they over-dress it!
As an aside, I’m going to admit a super-guilty pleasure of mine, and I almost feel dirty admitting this in public, but… I am fascinated by the TLC shows about American gypsies. The teen girls and most of the mothers are almost universally built like the proverbial brick shit houses. While the cameras were rolling one day they were standing in the kitchen drinking shots. No, not alcohol, their society frowns on women drinking alcohol. They were drinking shots of vinegar and claimed it was responsible for their figures!
I thought it sounded kind of suspect, but now you seem to agree with them. I’m going to have to give this more thought! If a shot of vinegar is what it takes, I’ll go back to the bad Okie-Mex place and buy a gallon of salad dressing, pour off the canola oil and drink it in shots! (Heaven knows I’ve drunk it out of the paper salad cups before!) Heck, they might even make me a batch without adding the oil in the first place!