Experimental Escabeche de Verduras

Today we have a big batch of assorted hot and sweet peppers around, so we're going to make something akin to the mixture of pickled vegetables and chiles one sometimes encounters in Mexican cuisine. Our ingredients: The aforementioned peppers, a few carrots, one head of garlic, and an onion.

We sliced the carrots on a diagonal, cut up one quarter of the onion into fairly large pieces, peeled the garlic cloves, seeded and cut up the larger peppers and left the smaller ones whole, and added everything to a big glass jar.

If you want to get yourself a great big jar like this, you could try living with a hippie for awhile. They might leave a few behind when they eventually move out.

Next, we added 1 tablespoon of white peppercorns (also left behind by the hippie) and a brine made from 6 tablespoons of sea salt and a half gallon of water.

We topped off the jar with a little more water (we find that not having much air space at the top inhibits mold growth), put a pint beer glass in the top of the jar to keep most of the air out, and set the jar in a plastic container to catch any overflow.

Finally, we tastefully covered the top with a cloth dishtowel to keep any stray bugs out.

Now the jar is resting atop the fridge, and we will be checking the contents from time to time over the next 4-7 days to see how the pickles are progressing. Ideally they should transform from simply tasting salty to taking on a delicious, zingy, acidic flavor due to the actions of wild lactobacilli. We'll be back in a few days with photos of the jar as it gets cloudier and some notes on the developing flavors...

Improvised Beet & Cucumber Kimchi

Today, as usual, we are going to be working with whatever is around in the kitchen that looks like it might be pickle ingredients: 4 beets, 2 cucumbers, 8 cloves of pickled garlic from a previous batch of pickles, and a pitifully small piece of ginger found in the fridge:

Plus, 3/4 of a lemon found lying on the kitchen table:

What was done:

Washed and trimmed the rough parts off the beets and chopped them up, sliced the cucumbers, then tossed veggies with 1 tablespoon of kosher salt and the juice of the 3/4 lemon:

Coarsely chopped the garlic and ginger with 2 tablespoons of Korean pepper paste and 2 tablespoons of Korean coarse red pepper in a food processor:

Mixed everything up in a bowl:

And packed it all into a jar:

The jar is now sitting atop the fridge, loosely capped so that any gases can escape. As the pickles sit there, the beets are throwing off a lot of pretty red juice, and every now and then I'm shutting the jar tighter and turning it so the vegetables get coated. In a day or so we'll have our first taste test!

Okra, Carrot, & Eggplant Pickles

Pickle-making time again! Every week we start a new batch of pickles because it helps us use up extra veggies from our farm share box and because we're fanatics for pickles, especially brine ones. Sandor Katz's recipe for sour pickles was the initial inspiration for our pickling habit, and we have discovered this recipe is extremely versatile; almost any vegetable makes a great pickle. We've pickled cucumbers, squash, carrots, green beans, jalapeños and other peppers, and garlic. Aside from peeling the garlic (never exclude this ingredient), making brine pickles is easy and all about not doing anything, except admiring your colorful, cloudy jar of vegetables floating in seasoned brine as you wait for time and microorganisms to do the work for you.

This past weekend we decided to pickle the rest of the okra that didn't make it into the kimchi, a few small eggplants (we grow a white variety ourselves), and some leftover carrots.

After washing the vegetables and adding them to a large jar along with peeled garlic cloves from a whole head and two tablespoons of peppercorns, I filled a bowl with six cups of water and stirred in roughly five tablespoons of salt. I always forget the ratio of water to salt in the pickling brine and often guess, but Katz lists six tbsp of salt per half gallon (eight cups); so I usually add three tbsp to four cups of water. (It's probably variable how much salt needs to go in since Katz also has a no-salt sauerkraut recipe.)

The veggies and six cups of brine alone did not fill up the jar; I needed to add about two to four cups more brine. Lightbulb! This time I reached for Tony Cachere's Creole Seasoning instead of sea salt. Running the risk of becoming that recipe blog that uses Tony's in everything, I chose it because its main ingredient is salt and okra frequently appears in Creole dishes. (This seasoning first came to my attention when I was looking for a good dirty rice recipe online and stumbled upon the glorious Gumbo Pages, an inspiring collection of Creole and Cajun recipes for those seeking to recreate their trips to Louisiana.)

The Tony's had settled and this week's pickles were ready to start pickling. What an especially colorful batch, almost a rainbow made out of vegetables and seasonings. I plugged the top of the jar with a pint glass to help keep the veggies below the brine and covered the jar with a dish towel to keep dust and the wrong kind of bugs out.

3 DAYS LATER:

The pickles are now swimming in a cloudy sea of gut-friendly bacteria, salt, and spices. The okra are ready to eat and very good (or at least good enough for us to have had about 10 each already): tangy, salty, and with a bite from the Creole seasoning and peppercorns. We still have not tried the eggplant, and the carrots are not 100% pickled, so we're leaving the jar out for at least another 24 hours or so before moving it to the fridge. We've never seen Tony's seasoning featured in a pickling recipe before, and must say that it goes perfectly with the okra. The tiny hairs on the okra, in fact, seem to have prevented the spices from all sinking to the bottom of the jar, and all of them had a nice coating, sort of like bbq potato chips, if they were wet, briny vegetables.

Okra Kimchi Update

With the current summer heat in Austin, the temperature in our house is about 80-82 degrees Fahrenheit most of the time, and it is probably warmer on top of the fridge right next to the back door, so things start fermenting there pretty quickly it seems. We started testing the okra kimchi after it had sat on top of the fridge for about 24 hours. By this morning (more like 36 hours), the vegetables had started to take on a noticeable tanginess we attributed to lactic fermentation, and we moved the jar to the fridge, but not before using it as a breakfast side dish alongside an omelette and some toast:

We must have been thinking that this okra kimchi has a natural affinity for eggs, because yesterday's taste-test included a frittata, heavy on the leeks that accidentally got left out of the kimchi:

Verdict: The okra and sweet potato greens kimchi is delicious and will probably get even better as it continues to sit in the fridge over the next week or so until we finish the jar. The okra and sweet potato stems have a nice crunchiness, and the bright, spicy kimchi flavors are a fine change of pace from the (also very delicious) brined okra pickles we have been making almost every week around here lately, a fresh batch of which will be detailed in the next update.

Note: If you do not enjoy the slimy consistency of okra, this okra kimchi is not one of those foods that's going to make it all better for you. You're still going to hate it. In fact the sweet potato greens just help to slime it up a bit more, which makes it all the better for us because we like okra slime around here. Slimy pickled okra and a runny French omelette? Sounds like breakfast!

Creole Fusion Kimchi with Okra and Sweet Potato Greens

Ok, we're going to start off with a bang here: kimchi made out of okra and sweet potato greens, and we're going to vary the base kimchi recipe to include Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning, which gets a lot of play around the kitchen here, most notably as an all-purpose barbecue rub. Our ingredients will be:

Okra (Looks like about 3 cups. The purple ones are from our home garden.)

This bunch of sweet potato greens. This is an unfamiliar ingredient we've never used before. Tasted raw, the leaves are fairly bland with possibly a hint of a parsley flavor, and have a mucilaginous quality somewhat reminiscent of the okra. The stems tasted fine too and will add a bit of nice crunch, so in they go!

Leek (this one)

Garlic (4 large cloves)

Ginger (about half this much, not peeled)

Korean hot pepper paste (3 tablespoons)

Korean hot pepper powder (2 tablespoons)

Tony's Creole seasoning (1 tablespoon)

Kosher salt

Rice vinegar (1/3 cup)

Steps taken:

• Washed okra and sweet potato greens. Coarsely chopped greens with stems, tossed with salt.

• Put salted vegetables into salad spinner with a couple of heavy bowls on top.

• Put garlic, ginger, hot pepper paste, red pepper powder, Tony's seasoning, and vinegar into food processor and pureed:

• At this point a decision was reached not to let the vegetables drain and wilt overnight. Actually we've always skipped that step, and it seemed especially unnecessary considering we were mostly using okra, which wasn't going to wilt anyway.

• The vegetables seemed a little too salty at this point so they got a slight rinsing.

• Mixed the spice mixture with the vegetables.

• Packed veggies into a re-used quart yogurt jar, capped it loosely, and left it on top of the fridge.

• At this point there were leftover vegetables that would not fit into the jar. What to do??

• Answer: Stir-fry them with the leek we forgot to add earlier and serve them for dinner over rice with an egg on top. Delicious!

We'll be checking back in on the jar of okra and greens in a few days, but I'll be damned if it doesn't taste great already! Truthfully, the Tony's isn't all that noticeable, but it's not hurting anything either. Maybe we should have added more, or it should have entirely replaced the salt?

First Post!

Welcome to our blog. We are a pair of musicians and artists from Austin, Texas, who, initially inspired by reading Sandor Ellix Katz' Wild Fermentation, have spent the last 6 months or so making batch after batch of kimchi and assorted fermented pickles at home. In part, this obsession has been fueled by weekly boxes of vegetables from local CSA farm Johnson's Backyard Garden, and the accompanying need to continuously find new and creative ways to use each week's batch, hopefully before the next arrives.

This constant influx of new and sometimes unfamiliar vegetables has led to constant experimentation with what goes into the pickle jar. Neither of us had ever seen pattypan squash pickles in the store before, but they turned out to be delicious! One area of constant experimentation has been in the realm of kimchi. A friend pointed us to David Lebovitz' excellent blog, where he posted a great basic kimchi recipe that we have used as a jumping-off point for our own experiments, using a variety of vegetables: cabbage, assorted greens, beets, carrots, and turnips have all produced fine results so far.

What we are planning to do in this blog is document our experiments in pickling, providing detailed notes and photographs of ingredients used and techniques. Each week or so a new batch will be started, and tasting notes and photographs of previous batches will also be presented. We intend to be bold and audacious in our experimentation, looking for new and exciting combinations and focusing on seasonally-available ingredients, whatever they may be.

We are not experts, but are not afraid to make this stuff up as we go along. In fact, we like it better that way. We're also not particularly afraid of mold and getting food poisoning. Months of consuming wild-fermented pickles have convinced us that we're probably not going to get sick from whatever microbes are floating around the air in our kitchen (if anything, we both feel healthier than ever before). We will share our successes and failures with you here, in this blog, so that we can all learn from them together. Comments and suggestions are encouraged!

And so, with that in mind, coming up next.... how about making some kimchi with okra, sweet potato greens and Creole seasonings?