Further Adventures in Green Tomatoes: Pickling

Determined to plow through the surfeit of green tomatoes piled on every surface in my house, I have continued my tomato-preserving marathon.

Today's installment: Pickled whole green cherry tomatoes and pickled green tomatoes.

Both of these recipes are adapted from Putting Food By by Janet Green, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan, a very fine food-preserving reference book.

I made big batches of each of these last week, and I can report that the whole pickled cherries were a satisfying and relatively quick project, while the sweet and sour tomatoes were much more time consuming (lots of steps), with a relatively small yield for all of the work (because the tomatoes cook down so much). The final Sweet and Sour Pickled Greens did taste and smell divine, though, so maybe it's worth all the effort. When we crack open a jar in the dead of winter and the memory of standing over a hot stove for all those hours has faded a bit, I imagine it will seem worth it.

Here are both of the recipes:

Pickled Sweet and Sour Green Tomatoes

• 7 1/2 pounds green tomatoes (about 30 medium tomatoes)
• 2 large red onions or 2 cups pearl onions
• 3/4 cup high-quality fine-ground salt
• 1 Tbs celery seed
• 1 Tbs mustard seed
• 1 Tbs dry mustard
• 1 Tbs whole cloves
• 1 Tbs peppercorns
• 3 lemons, thinly sliced plus 1 lemon, juiced
• 2 sweet red peppers
• 2 1/2 cups honey
• 3 cups apple cider vinegar

1. Wash tomatoes well and cut off blossom ends, blemishes and stems.
2. Slice tomatoes and peel and slice onions.
3. Sprinkle salt over alternate layers of tomatoes and let stand in a cool place overnight
4. Drain off the brine, rinse the vegetables thoroughly in cold water, and drain well.
5. Slice the lemons and remove the seeds; wash the peppers well, remove seeds and stems, and slice thinly crossways.
6. Put the spices in a muslin bag or large tea ball, submerge in vinegar, and bring to a boil.
7. Add tomatoes, onions, lemons, and peppers. Cook for 30 minutes after the mixture returns to a boil, stirring gently to prevent scorching.
8. Remove spice bag and add honey.
9. Pack the pickles in sterilized jars, and cover with boiling liquid, leaving 1/2 inch of headroom.
10. Scorch lids, cap the jars and process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Pickled Cherry Tomatoes

• 24 cups hard, entirely unripe green cherry tomatoes
• Bay leaves, mustard seeds, dry or fresh hot peppers, black pepper corns, celery seed, dill (fresh or dried), and garlic to taste
• 1 sliced red onion'
• 3 lemons, peeled and thinly sliced
• 4 cups water
• 2 cups cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup high quality, fine-ground salt

1. Sterilize 12 pint jars and in the bottom of each jar put a bay leaf or two, a clove or two of garlic, a dried or fresh hot pepper, 1/2 tsp of mustard seed, a couple of heads of dill or a Tbs of dried dill, and other seasonings to taste.
2. Pack the jars with tomatoes, layering in onion slices here and there. Leave about 1/4 inch head space, and pack the tomatoes tightly.
3. Make the brine by combining the water, vinegar, and salt. Bring to a boil.
4. Pour the boiling brine into the jars to just cover the tomatoes. Wait a couple of minutes for the brine to settle and add more brine if necessary to make sure the tomatoes are covered, still leaving head room. I found that the tomatoes have a tendency to float, so I added a slice of lemon on the top of each jar to weigh them down.
5. Scald the jar lids and cap the jars. Process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.

I'm imagining using these pickled cherries as an elegant little antipasto-type dish. I can't report yet on how they will taste, but rumor has it they are a bit like olives. I predict they will be salty, tart, and sour, with a satisfying cherry tomato pop when you bite them. We'll see. I am also anticipating bringing them out for farm-style cocktails -- since they can also be used in martinis!

Spicy Radish Relish ... Further Adventures in Refrigerator Pickling

French Breakfast Radishes harvested last month

Radishes have been one of the few vegetables growing like gangbusters in the garden over the past 6 weeks, along with lettuce and the heartier greens. So it's high time we figured out what to do with them.

Through the spring, summer, and fall our garden produced a fair number of radishes (here's a post from a previous radish profusion last Spring). Throughout the year, in came the radishes, easy and reliable. I threw slices into krauts and added them to crocks of brine-pickled veggies, and Christopher grated them with carrots onto his salads. By the time the late fall bumper crop of radishes peaked, we had a backlog of radishes. So I was motivated to search for a way to use or preserve them in bulk.

Christopher's step-father once mentioned an old Mother Earth News recipe for radish relish that had been a favorite of theirs when they used to have a big garden. I looked in lots of books and on lots of websites, and found a wide variety of recipes, including the very same original Mother Earth News recipe, which contained way too much sugar for me to take it seriously.

I did discover that radish relishes are a popular condiment in a number of Asian cuisines, usually made as short-term "refrigerator pickles" without heat processing, and stored for weeks at a time in the fridge.

Loyal readers will recall my affection for refrigerator pickles (here's a post from last summer on refrigerator pickling). I like making them because they're easy, quick, and don't require heating up your kitchen with a steamy canning process. Making a refrigerator-relish from radishes seemed like the perfect short-term preservation method, and a good way to process a quantity of radishes at once.

So here's the recipe I created based on my radish relish research--mine is unlike most that I found in that it has no sugar, lots of ginger and garlic, and all good-for-you ingredients:

Spicy Radish Relish

Makes about 1 1/2 quarts

• 20 medium-sized radishes
• 1-3 inches fresh ginger root
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp whole mustard seeds
• 1 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tsp salt
• A few grinds of fresh pepper
• 4 Tbs honey

Radishes shredded and on their way to becoming relish.

1. Wash and shred radishes – either with a hand grater or in the food processor – and put them in a bowl. Grind some pepper onto the radishes.
2. Grate ginger finely and press garlic with a garlic press.
3. In a small saucepan, combine the vinegar, water, ginger, garlic, mustard seeds, and honey; bring to a boil.
4. Pour the hot liquid over the radishes. Cover and refrigerate. Let the flavors mingle and mellow at least overnight before using.

The final product is pretty and potent. You can use it as a topping for stir fries and salads, or mixed in with cooked greens as a side dish, or as a palate-cleansing garnish on a sushi platter.

You could vary this recipe by adding onions and some finely chopped celery if you had some on hand and were so inclined.

After smelling and tasting this stuff, I can't imagine a better condiment for cold season. The pungent, spicy smell and taste seem like they would be the perfect little something on your plate when you have a cold or are coming down with one. The spicy radishes and mustard are great for clearing the sinuses, and the ginger and garlic are classic tonic herbs for winter. Add to that some immune-boosting local honey, and the healing power of apple cider vinegar, and you have another great tonic food - a kitchen concoction that is both delicious and good for what ails you.


The finished relish ready to marinate in the fridge

More on brine pickling

Jars of recently brined pickles: mixed vegetables on the left and summer squash on the right.

Earlier this summer, I blogged about one of my favorite old-fashioned, probiotic ways to preserve vegetables -- pickling them in salt water. (See the original post, Coming Home to Abundance for brine-pickling instructions, references, and background).

Brine pickling has been such an ongoing, everyday part of life at our house over the past few months of heavy harvest that I wanted to write a little bit more about it, with specific comments on various vegetables for brining.

This summer, I've brine-pickled cucumbers, squash, okra, onions, garlic, radishes, beets, carrots, and cauliflower, all with good results. Fresh dill, basil, and parsley all pickle well, too, and add great flavor to brine pickles. I have a crock going now of baby squash, the last of the summer carrots, and okra with dill flowers. I'm sure I've brined other things in summers past, but I don't remember them all!

I do remember that I tried fingerling eggplants once with disastrous results (mushy and moldy), so I don't recommend brining eggplant. Other things I DON'T recommend brining include: ripe tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and lettuce. I've known friends to brine watermelon rinds (very delicious) and green tomatoes successfully, too.

I've found that squash and cucumbers do great pickled whole and then de-brined (soaked in cold water), sliced, and stored in a 4-to-1 water/vinegar solution. They'll last almost indefinitely in the fridge that way.

You can store the pickles in the original brining liquid, which is cloudy and full of beneficial bacteria, but it's generally a bit salty for my taste. I like to pour it off and save it to use for other things, including just pouring a shot of it into sauerkraut or pickles when packing into jars for storage.

Okra is really tasty brined whole and either sliced and packed or just packed as whole pods (they look cool that way). This is an outstanding way to keep up with the okra overload when your okra plants are producing faster than you can possibly come up with clever ways to disguise okra for fresh consumption.

Small carrots are great brined whole, and are a surprisingly yummy snack - salty, crunchy, and crisp.

Onions do better quartered than whole, unless they're pretty small. Pearl-sized pickled onions are GREAT.

An easy way to get started with brine pickling is to fill a crock or big jar with all the brine-able veggies that you have lying around needing to be used. Make sure they're washed and prepped as described in my earlier post and then pour a strong brine solution over them (1/2 cup salt to 1 quart water). Press down (I use a plate weighted with a full jar on top), make sure they're submerged, cover, and wait. In warm weather, the pickles will be salty, sour, and pickled in as little as 10 days. It really is like magic!

Refrigerator pickles

We planted Edmonson and Japanese Long cucumbers and are now experiencing massive cucumber overload.

I'm brine pickling some cucumbers whole, but in an effort to keep up with the pace of production, I made a giant batch of "refrigerator pickles" too (ingredients shown above).

My refrigerator pickles are loosely based on Mollie Katzen's Wilted Cucumber Salad recipe, which has been a summer favorite of mine for years. Here's her recipe, from the Enchanted Broccoli Forest:

Wilted Cucumber Salad

Make this a day ahead so the cucumbers can fully absorb their marinade. This keeps beautifully in the refrigerator for 2 weeks or more.

2/3 cup vinegar (wine or cider)

1/3 cup water

4 Tbs. honey or sugar

1 tsp. salt

1/2 cup thinly sliced red onion

4 medium-sized cukes, peeled, seeded and thinly sliced

fresh black pepper to taste

2 Tbs. minced fresh dill

Combine the vinegar, water, honey or sugar, and salt in a small saucepan. Heat just to the boiling point, then remove from heat. Place the onion and cucumber slices in a medium-large bowl, and add the hot liquid. Cool to room temp, add pepper and dill. Transfer to a jar with a tightly fitting lid. Chill until cold.

I like to add a fair amount of coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley to this mix, and I use considerably less honey (about half of what Mollie calls for) and NO sugar! I'm not categorically opposed to sugar, but honey tastes a lot better in this recipe to me.

For this batch I increased the volume of everything but the sweetener in this by about 6 times, and threw in a bunch of fresh dill flowers and leaves.

Here's the finished product -- just shy of 5 quarts of refrigerator pickles. We'll eat some tonight with friends along with a bunch of other summer salads.

Making these is a warm reminder of my gratitude to Mollie Katzen, who was a huge part of my food education. I cooked from her classic vegetarian cookbooks all through high school and college and into my "grown up" years.... She introduced me to Swiss Chard, helped me survive as a teenage vegetarian in the sticks, and made me feel like I was part of a community that cared about food for years before I actually experienced that community in person.

I hardly ever use recipes any more, and if I do, I can't help but modify them (add parsley, decrease honey) but I still keep the old Moosewoods around as reference books, right beside "The Joy" in every kitchen I've ever established over the past dozen years. Thanks Mollie!

Coming Home to Abundance

After a week of air and car travel and some wonderful time in Colorado, I returned to an avalanche of vegetables.

I felt like kissing the ground when my plane landed in Asheville after 12 hours of travel -- so grateful to come back to these lush, soft mountains after the rocky and dramatic landscape of the west.

In the garden, everything is exploding in flower and fruit. Zinnias, nasturtiums, bee balm, fennel, calendula, poppies, strawflowers, and sunflowers are in full bloom. Japanese Long Cucumbers are coming in hot and heavy, bi-color zephyr squash is everywhere you look, greens are still kicking, broccoli is producing a second crop, peppers are starting to come in, and tomatoes are just a few days away from ripe.

Above: Japanese Long Cucumber plants jumping the fence....

At left: Some of the food we brought in from the garden this morning...

This morning's harvest included cucumbers, cauliflower, beets, onions, purple jalepenos, cherry tomatoes, squash, edible gourds, okra, dill, and basil. Last night we feasted on food from the garden - a perfect welcome home.

Christopher reminded me of when I used to brine vegetables, making a mixed crock of pickled veggies, when we lived in town. Since we had so many cukes and squash today, along with plenty of other brine-able veggies, I started a crock this afternoon.

Pickling in salt water, or brine, is an ancient and easy way to preserve vegetables for later use. No electricity or heat is required, and you end up with delicious sour and salty pickled veggies that last for months.

For more information on brine pickling, see Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation or Marilyn Kluger's Preserving Summer's Bounty.

Here's a summary of how brining works from Kluger: "Produce that has been properly cured in a 10 percent brine will keep almost indefinitely. The brine solution is strong enough to kill most of the bacteriathat are present when the vegetables are put into the salt water. Those that survive salt are destroyed in due time by the lactic acid that is produced by the bacteria themselves when they decompose the sugar drawn out of the cucumbers by the salt, through the process of fermentation. The lactic acid formed is responsible for much of the desirable flavor of fermented pickles."

A few years ago, when I was first getting way into brining vegetables in the summer for winter sour pickles, an old family friend told me that at her grandmother's house when she was a little girl, it was a special treat to get to go out behind the house to the underground root cellar and pull out pickled baby corn from a big crock to eat as a snack. She remembered the salty, sour taste of pickled corn as an old mountain tradition, one that had been lost in her family when root cellars and crocks were replaced by refrigeration and tupperware.

Packing cucumbers, squash, and okra into a crock today, I felt deeply connected to the long chain of food tradition that mostly women have stewarded for so many generations, handing down recipes, swapping techniques, and working together in families and communities to process and preserve food.

Here's a basic recipe for the mixed vegetable brine pickle I made today. I used the veggies that we happened to have in the garden today; you can use whatever is fresh and available.

Ingredients and Equipment:

• Fresh vegetables and herbs: okra, squash, cucumbers, peppers, peeled garlic, small onions, cauliflower, basil, and dill
• Sea salt and black peppercorns
• Water
• A large ceramic crock or (if you don't have a crock) a large wide-mouthed glass jar such as a cookie or apothecary jar (not a mason jar). You need a jar or crock with a mouth wide enough for a plate to fit inside. I used a 5 gallon ceramic crock, one of the best kitchen investments I've ever made, bought a few years ago from Lehman's.
• A plate that fits inside the crock and something to weigh it down. An old-time method is to use a rock; I use a mason jar filled with water (with the lid on to prevent spills).
  

Directions:

1. Wash all of your vegetables and herbs thoroughly, and make sure the blossom-ends are scrubbed or cut off. You can cut up anything that's too large and unwieldy for the crock, and leave everything else whole. Put all of the veggies in the crock, and add pepper, dill, basil, and anything else you want to throw in for flavor.
2. Dissolve salt in water at the ratio of 1 cup per 2 quarts of water.
3. Pour the salt water over the vegetables until they're covered. You might have to keep making more brine until you have enough to completely cover the veggies. I used about 5 quarts of brine.
   
4. Sit the plate inside the crock so that no air is trapped underneath it, and weigh it down with something heavy and press down.
   
5. All of the veggies should be well underwater. If they are not, keep adding brine mixed at the same proportion until they are completely submerged.
   
6. Throw on a little extra salt on top for good measure.
7. Cover with a clean, lightweight cloth (I use a floursack dishtowel).
   
8. Let the crock sit for 3-6 weeks, skimming off any scum that forms.

Brined vegetables can keep for a long time in the crock -- remember my friend's grandmother's pickled corn was stored, already pickled, in the crock in a cool place. Or, when the pickles reach your desired point of flavor, you can jar them up and refrigerate them, and they'll keep for a long time there, too. You can de-salt them before serving if you want by rinsing.

Some people desalt and process brined vegetables--Preserving Summer's Bounty has lots of recipes for pickle preparations using brined vegetables as an ingredient. I avoid heat-processing brined vegetables so that the beneficial bacteria that is created in the fermentation process is preserved.

At left: the beginning of today's mixed vegetable crock...