Eco-Friendly Living: Pickling

Aug 27, 2020 | My interests

Two quart jars of cauliflower in brine on a plate. Jars are unlidded and have small jars in their mouths as weights.

Here’s what is currently pickling on my kitchen counter: two jars of cauliflower pickles, one with herbs, the other without.

If you missed my last post, you might be wondering what on earth pickles have to do with wedding planning.  The answer is, “Nothing!”  But it’s all part of eco-friendly living, which is what I try to do every day.  And since I’m not working on weddings this summer, I am writing about other things that interest me.

Last week, I wrote about freezing food.  This week, I’d like to explore a little bit of the world of fermentation.  Pickling and other forms of fermentation are a whole world unto themselves, so I can just touch on a bit of it and give you some resources for further exploration.

There are two basic kinds of pickles: quick pickles (or refrigerator pickles) and brine pickles.   I don’t actually know much about quick pickles, because I prefer the slow method, but all the recipes look pretty easy.  Quick pickles (vegetables in vinegar, mainly) are usually canned for better shelf life.

Brine pickling is, in essence, setting up the conditions for microorganisms to preserve your food for you. This generally involves salt.  If you want to get into detail, there are lots of online resources.  I am also very fond of the books of Sandor Katz, who knows a lot about the subject.  Try his Wild Fermentation for an excellent introduction to the subject and lots of recipes.

The basic idea of bring pickling is to put your vegetables into a salt-water brine and let them ferment for anywhere from a week to three weeks until they are pickled. After that, you can refrigerate them or can them for further storage. (Or you can just eat them without storing them!) I don’t like to can them, as I prefer not to kill all the microorganisms.

EQUIPMENT

You don’t need a lot of special equipment for pickling. You can use what you have. If you happen to own crocks and pickling weights, that’s great. If you don’t, you can use glass jars, plastic buckets, the ceramic crock of an old crock pot, whatever you have or can find for a container, as long as it is food safe.

It’s usually necessary to put some kind of weight on your pickles to keep them under the brine. As a weight, I usually use water-filled glass jars that are smaller than the diameter of the container I’m using. If I have a large container and a small weight, I’ll put a plate under the weight to hold everything down. If you don’t have a jar that will work for a weight, you can use a plastic bag filled with water or brine (in case it leaks) or a clean rock or paperweight.  Be sure to clean and boil or otherwise disinfect rocks or household objects so they don’t disrupt your pickles.

It is also not necessary to use airlocks on your pickling containers. If you have them and like to use them, that’s great. But you can make perfectly good pickles without them. The only thing is that pickles exposed to the air will grow yeast on their surface (which is why you want to weigh them down to keep them under the brine). A little yeast won’t hurt you, but if you leave the yeast for long enough, it will grow a blue-ish mold that you really don’t want to eat and that will make your pickles inedible.

So, check your pickles every day while they are fermenting and clear the yeast off, rinse your weight, and put it all back. I just use my fingers to wipe yeasty mold off the surface of the brine and off the sides of the container. A lot of it will come off on your pickling weight too, so rinse and dry the weight well before you put it back.

You also want to be sure to cover your pickles with a towel or other covering to keep flies out. Flies can ruin a batch of pickles faster than just about anything. And put the date you started the pickles on the jar or on your calendar so you know when they started–and when they might be done.

INGREDIENTS

The three ingredients you need for a successful pickle are:

  • Fresh vegetables
  • Salt with no iodine or other ingredients (sea salt, rock salt, kosher salt)
  • Water with no chlorine

Salt is often iodized or contains anti-caking agents, which interfere with the pickling process. You want to use sea salt or other non-iodized salt with no additives. It doesn’t have to be expensive.  I’ve gotten cheap bags of sea salt from a neighborhood market that work just fine.

The water you use is also important. Chlorine kills the microorganisms that create your pickle, so be sure not to use fresh tap water. You can use filtered water, or you can leave the water sitting out for a few hours until the chlorine evaporates.

The basic ratios I use for salt amounts are these:  If I’m making sauerkraut or something similar that doesn’t use a brine, I use about 3 T salt to 4 or 5 pounds of cabbage or other vegetables.  For brine pickles, the brine I make generally has 1/2 T to 3/4 tablespoon of salt per cup of water.  If you’re using a finely ground salt, you can use an amount on the smaller side, since a tablespoon of fine salt has less air in it than a tablespoon of rock salt.

So how do you know when your pickle is done?  Taste it!  At first, most pickling vegetables are not sour.  They may even taste funny while they are fermenting.  Don’t give up on them.  The peculiar flavors are part of the process of transformation.  At some point (and it always seems like magic to me), the brine will turn sour and vinegar-y, and the vegetables will taste like a pickle.  In hot weather, with small vegetables, it might only take a week.  In cooler weather, you can count on it being three weeks or even longer.

If you use more salt, the fermentation will go slower.  With less salt, it will go faster.  If you put in too much salt, fermentation will stop entirely, so keep an eye on how  much you are using.  I once had to compost an entire batch of watermelon pickles because I used too much salt and it never pickled.

So, what can you pickle?  I’m pretty sure you can pickle almost any vegetable except ripe tomatoes.  (Pickled green tomatoes are, of course, a deli staple, and delicious!)  Soft greens are probably not a good choice, either, unless you have a specialized recipe.  Cabbage, turnips, radishes, and any other sturdy vegetable in the cabbage family are a great place to start.  Cucumbers, zucchini, and peppers are also easy and fun.  I’ve also tried carrots, eggplant, garlic, onions, okra, and probably a few other things that I can’t recall.

If you find that you need more information, Mr. Google is a great help.  I had never pickled cauliflower before, so I searched for recipes.  Turns out that there is a wide range of them available!  So, take what you know, find out what you need, and don’t be intimidated by the wonderful world of pickles.  Start with a small batch, if you’re not sure how it will turn out.  Once you get started, you’ll find out how easy and fun it is.

I’ll be doing a Zoom workshop on this subject for Wild Onion Market, my local food co-op start-up, on Tuesday, September 29 at 7:00 pm CDT.  You’re invited to join in: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89593190791.

Eco-Friendly Living: Freezing Fresh Food

Aug 19, 2020 | My interests

A row of one-pint canning jars, stacked in twos, on a wooden shelf.

This is just a small portion of my jar collection for food storage!

Since all the weddings I was going to work on this summer have been postponed until next year, I want to share some of my other interests with you. First up, food storage! If you’re interested in eating local food (and I am), storing the summer’s abundance is one way to make sure you have the best food all winter.  It also strengthens the local food system and helps reduce greenhouse gases.  

It is a little-known fact that a lot of vegetable farmers grow more food than they can sell, and much of that abundance goes back into their compost piles, instead of being eaten.  But we can all save a little of it for ourselves, maybe with enough to share with our neighbors.

For the last 7 or 8 years, I’ve been storing food all summer and eating it in the winter. When I started doing it, I had no idea how much work it was going to be. If you’re thinking of doing the same, I just want you to know up front that it can easily take over all of your summer weekends. I think it’s worth it!

STRATEGIES

My main strategies for storing food in the winter are freezing, pickling, root vegetable storage, canning, and a little bit of dehydrating.  Because I’m not an expert on canning, I’ll share with you what I know about the other four strategies. Today, we’ll look at freezing.

The way I choose what to store is by paying close attention not only to what is in season, but to what there is an abundance of. If you see that a farmer has a sale on something, it is probably because they have a lot of it. I buy whatever is abundant and then preserve it. In the spring, it might be spinach or asparagus. Right now, it’s zucchini and tomatoes. In October, it could be turnips or rutabagas.

I also spend a lot of time talking to farmers at the market, and learning from them what they have a lot of and what they expect to have a lot of in the near future so I can plan my preserving projects.

Freezing is probably the easiest thing to start with.

What you need:

  • Equipment for basic cooking
  • Containers for freezing
  • Freezer space

You can freeze almost anything, if you put your mind to it. Some things come out better than others, but the freezer is your friend.  And the internet is also your friend.  If I’m not sure how to freeze something (like, say, mashed potatoes the year I had a big batch of potatoes that didn’t survive in storage), someone has a blog post about it somewhere.

For the most part, you want to freeze only produce that has been cooked, whether lightly or thoroughly. There are exceptions, such as small berries that don’t lose much quality when they are frozen fresh. I also freeze cherry tomatoes and fresh peppers without freezing. You probably will want to cook any food you freeze fresh, as the texture does degrade.

You can make big batches of food that includes produce and freeze that, or you can freeze batches of individual kinds of produce, which is mostly what I do. I also freeze fruit sauces (apple sauce, etc.) if I don’t can them.

I like to steam vegetables in batches very lightly before I freeze them so that they come out as fresh as possible. It is necessary to cook them at least a little to prevent the cell walls of the fruit or vegetable from breaking apart when the water in them freezes. Frozen raw vegetables generally have a terrible texture. If you prefer, you can blanch vegetables (dip them briefly in boiling water) or cook them with a little water in the microwave.

Cook them (by whatever method you choose) for a minute or two until they just start to look cooked (green vegetables turn bright green), put them immediately into ice water to cool them, and drain them thoroughly. Then pack them as tightly as possible into containers (squeezing out as much air and water as possible), label them with the contents and the date, and put them in the freezer.  It really is that simple.

There are some vegetables that I cook thoroughly before storing.  Two of my favorites are eggplant and cauliflower.  I roast them in the oven and then freeze them.  Those two seem to hold up very well to that kind of treatment.  Less robust vegetables seem to fare better with lighter cooking.

I also have a list posted on the outside of the fridge that tells me how much of what kinds of vegetables and fruit I have in the freezer, so I can be sure to store a nice mix of things, and so that I know how much I have.  But maybe that’s just my love of spread sheets showing.  If I can’t plan things, at least I can use my spread sheet skills to keep track of my fruits and vegetables!

A lot of people like to freeze food in plastic bags. I’m skeptical of plastic, though, especially at extreme temperatures, so I freeze everything in glass jars. If you are going to use glass, you can use any kind of glass jar, but don’t use anything larger than a one-pint jar. The larger jars have a tendency to crack in the freezer. (Ask me how I know!) Plastic bags do let you fit a lot more in your freezer, though, so you’ll have to do your own calculus about what works for you. Whatever you choose to do, be creative and see how much you can fit in your freezer.  It really is worth the trouble.

If you start now, you can still put tomatoes, greens, broccoli, cauliflower, beans, and a whole lot of other vegetables into your freezer before the end of farmers market season.  Set aside a couple of hours on the day you buy your fruit and vegetables, and get some of it in the freezer.  When winter comes, you’ll feel very well prepared.

I’ll be doing a Zoom workshop on this subject for Wild Onion Market, my local food co-op start-up, on Tuesday, September 29 at 7:00 pm CDT.  You’re invited to join in: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89593190791.

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