How do I easily pickle vegetables?

November 19, 2005 11:06 AM

My son and I got to talking about pickles the other day and how various vegetables can be pickled. We ended up at Penzey’s (we’re so lucky to have a store down the street!) and I got their pickling spice blend. We have some baby zucchini and carrots. Now… what the heck do I do?

I Googled around a bit and found a bunch of stuff that requires special equipment. I’m very confused. The spice mixture includes yellow and brown Canadian mustard seeds, Jamaican allspice, cracked China cassia, cracked Turkish bay leaves, dill seed, Zanzibar cloves, cracked China ginger, Tellicherry peppercorns, star anise, Moroccan coriander, juniper berries, West Indies mace, cardamom and medium hot crushed red peppers.

posted by houseofdanie to food & drink (14 comments total)

You go to the library or bookstore and get "Put a Lid On It" -- great book of small-batch canning recipes. Can't go wrong.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:13 AM on November 19, 2005

Make kimchi?
posted by jellicle at 11:20 AM on November 19, 2005

Pickles are cucumbers that sold out - Mitch Hedberg. Try this
posted by growabrain at 11:22 AM on November 19, 2005

Pickeld carrots are very easy to make. All you need are the carrots (washed and cut into carrot sticks, sized to fit in whatever size mason jar you're using), some kosher salt, some white vinegar, dill, garlic and jalapeno peppers.

First, prepare all of your ingredients. Wash and cut the carrots, peel the cloves of garlic (2 per jar should be good, although you can't go wrong with a few more), and cut the jalapenos into whatever amount you think is good - I usually put 1/2 a jalapeno per jar. Clean the dill, and cut it up so that you'll have 1 or 2 sprigs per jar.

Next, you'll need to prepare the mason jars. I put them in the oven (jar only, no lid) at about 250 degrees F, and wait until they get real hot.

While the mason jars are sterilizing you'll need to prepare a half-gallon or so of the pickling brine, which is just a mixture of salt, vinegar and water. I can't give you the proper proportions, so you'll need to get those elsewhere. Heat this up so it's almost at a very light boil, and keep it there.

At the same time, start a large pot of water boiling. It should be deep enough so that when you submerge the mason jars in it, the hot water should come up to about the shoulder of the jar.

Now it's time ot fill the jars. Use a pot holder or tongs to remove the jars from the oven, one by one. First, put the garlic, jalapenos and dill in each jar then cram in as many carrots as you can. Once it's full, put the jar in the boiling water. Do this for 2 or 3 more jars, until the pot is full of jars. After a few minutes, little bubbles should appear on the inside of the 1st jar you put in the pot. Take it out and quickly put the lid on the jar, and set it aside. Repeat for the remaining jars.

As the jars cool, the button on top of the lid should get pushed in. When you're finished with all of the jars, wait a few hours and check to see that none of the lids are still "popped" - if any are, remove the lid and re-boil the contents and try again.

Set the finished jars aside for a few weeks. Resist temptation to open them. Soon, you'll have a nice batch of dill-garlic-jalapeno pickled carrots. Yum!
posted by skwm at 11:34 AM on November 19, 2005 [1 favorite]

Well, you're going to need a recipe first. Always stick with the recipe, because it's been tested by the pros and they know it's safe. Do not use recipes out of old books, as they know a lot more about canning safely than they used to.

That spice mixture sounds a little busy. I use mostly dill, peppercorns, garlic cloves, and coriander. Actually, yours sounds more interesting though.

There are two ways you can make pickled veggies. You can stuff it all in a jar with vinegar and spices, and then water bath it, which makes the stuff pretty shelf stable. You don't have to refrigerate it, but the veggies will be softer because they have been cooked. The vinegar makes it so acid that it is safe to water bath the veggies and not worry about botulism. (Use within a year, or less if the recipe warns about it.)

The other way to do it is wash the stuff well, pack it raw into the jar and cover with boiling vinegar (having first sterilized the jar to kill wild spores, etc.) Then you whip it into the fridge, and wait for it to taste like pickles. They are immediately edible, but will taste a lot more like pickles after a week or so. This kind has to be kept under refrigeration permanently, and eaten within a much shorter time frame (but so good that's not a problem!) Because the veggies were not cooked, they're much crunchier. I personally like those better, but a few Mason jars of pickled veggies in the kitchen makes a lovely decorator touch on a shelf, and looks homey.

I haven't done that in years, and this is vastly over-simplified, but I thought maybe it might help you make sense of what you're finding in your reading. You're going to need something like a 22 quart stock pot to either water bath in or sterilize the jars in. Please remember that 22 quarts of boiling water is heavy, and don't get hurt.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 11:43 AM on November 19, 2005

You might try to hunt down Good Eats episode EACL31 "American Pickle." It originally aired January 12th, 2004.

It must be online somewhere, but not being a Bittorrent kind of person I couldn't even begin to tell you where to look.

I remember seeing it, and it had lots of good techniques and recipes. Of course if you're in the hate Alton Brown camp, then just ignore this.

Oops, ok here's a transcript.
posted by sevenless at 12:06 PM on November 19, 2005

Yes, I'm afraid you've gotten yourself into -- well, I'll avoid the obvious pun, but yes, canning is a process that requires some initial outlay for the proper tools, some of which you might already have. The good news is that it sounds far more difficult and bothersome than it is; once you've got the equipment, the basic instructions are very, very easy to follow. There's something very satisfying about eating food you've prepared this way.

I've canned tomatoes, which like pickles are a high-acid food and so should be prepared with water-bath canning. Here's what you need:

A water-bath canner (or extra-large stockpot with well-fitted lid, if you have one)
Mason jars with sealable lids (for pickles, I suggest quart size)
A sturdy set of tongs

This video shows you how to use the canner. You'll want a sent of good, basic canning instructions, which I'm sure you can get free at the library; I use the Ball Blue Book of Preserving, which is very comprehensive. From there, you can get into the particulars of your own recipe, which sounds very good.

(Also, as an added tip -- buy the firmest, freshest carrots and cucumbers you can; you're subject them to high heat, so you want nice crispy vegetables to start with.)

Finally, I don't much about cold canning, the salt it and stick it in the fridge type that the unrepentant hippie speaks of, but please be very, very careful. This pdf of problems that can occur with improper home canning is worth a quick read; the thing about the water-canning method is that you know you've killed everything. I wouldn't do cold-canning without reading up on it extensively, first.

Again, this all sounds very complicated, but I was a total novice a few summers ago when I canned about 5 gallons of tomatoes, and it was a breeze once I had everything in blace. If you decide to try it, I hope it works out for you!
posted by melissa may at 12:12 PM on November 19, 2005

No recipe to offer, but I believe you'll find a jar lifter helpful for removing the jars from the boiling water.
posted by leapingsheep at 1:47 PM on November 19, 2005

This may help. It's a recipe for Armenian toorshi -- pickled vegetables. Good stuff
posted by jdl at 2:03 PM on November 19, 2005

Check it out and have fun.

In sum, all you need to can pickles are jars, lids, rings, vinegar, salt, water, and a big pot. Oh and something to pickle.

I've pickled cucumbers, peppers, corn, and garlic (pickled garlic is fabulous, especially instead of an olive in a martini)
posted by plinth at 2:10 PM on November 19, 2005

Oh just to really simplify it, pickles are really nothing more than vegetables put into a crock with vinegar, water and salt. No special equipment at all. Of course, this type of pickle may not keep so well. Where it gets complicated (if at all) is enough process to make sure you kill any pathenogenic microbes. Boiling pickling solution and a water bath take care of that.

Personally, I've found store-bought pickling spice to be too sweet. I prefer, for cukes at least, to use a couple cloves of garlic, dill seed, and peppercorns. Maybe mustard seed or a few dried chiles.

Sunset Magazine published a pretty fabulous book on Home Canning, but it is long out of print.
posted by plinth at 2:20 PM on November 19, 2005

What plinth is talking about with a crock is a third process, where the whole mess goes into a crock and actually ferments. That's most commonly done with saurkraut, but will work on cucumbers. Then you can it, and kill the wildlife with a water bath. (You can use the pickles right out of the crock, but they don't keep long without processing.) I've made saurkraut, sometimes it works and sometimes it goes south on you. You put thin sliced cabbage in a crock. (You use a crock because this would eat up anything except ceramics.) You make layers of cabbage and layers of salt, and at the end, you put a plate over the cabbage to keep it under the juice, and on top of the plate goes The Kraut Rock, which is usually basalt, because this process would eat up anything similar to limestone. Basically, wild yeasts grow on it, and it turns into kraut in a while. Sometimes, the wrong yeasts get into it and you just end up with a crock full of rotten cabbage.

As far as the cold can thing, there are a couple of brands of pickles that you buy in the grocery store that you buy out of the fridge, and the pickles are crisp, so there is a way to do this without risking life and limb. Things like this are why I suggest you use real recipes, developed by the folks who make canning jars usually, because the proportions of salt & vinegar and the directions have been found to be reasonably safe.

I remember the Sunset books, they were terrific and are long out of print, but there are current references that are just as good. You still want to be wary of very old recipes.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 3:28 PM on November 19, 2005

You might pick up The Gourds' CD "Bolsa de Agua", for it contains the toe-tapping yet instructional tune "Pickles"
posted by Triode at 10:53 PM on November 19, 2005

I was going to ask this in an earlier thread, but feared that I would be roundly shouted down for being off-topic. However, the second pickle-store-related thread in week urges me to act:

I think of myself as a fairly well-rounded and worldly person. I've travelled and I live in a decently-sized city. Though no pretentious foodie, I'm certainly something of a gourmand. Having said all this, though, I have never ever in my entire life heard of a pickle store.

Surely I can't be alone in this. Yet, the somewhat matter-of-fact tone of both of these posts implies that they're a fairly common facet of people's lives. Is the pickle store phenomenon relatively new? Or do I just have a huge pickle store blind spot, preventing me from having seen them all this time?
posted by Ian A.T. at 4:32 PM on November 20, 2005