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.
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