How to pickle just about any vegetable
You can make your own pickles packed with crispness and sour notes
Millennia before Louis Pasteur discovered the bacteria-killing process known as pasteurization, our ravenous forbears found that foods lasted longer if they were treated to various procedures. Before mechanical refrigeration and freezing were the norm for extending the shelf life of food, methods included drying, salting, cooling and, of course, pickling.
What the Western Hemisphere now knows as “pickling” is simply the submersion of raw food in an acidic and/or salty solution as a means of preservation. Even though we no longer need to pickle food to preserve it, we still do it because we love the way it tastes.
Before I go on, allow me to mention that the dill or bread-and-butter pickles most of us love on burgers and alongside sandwiches are made from cucumbers and have a distinctive sour taste. And it’s that sour taste that — for me, at least — that marks a pickle as originating from the Western Hemisphere.
But the West does not own the pickle. In fact, pickles of some sort are found in nearly every culture, whether it’s heavily spiced, oil-soaked mangoes from India or spicy red cabbage and radish kimchi from the Korean Peninsula.
Because I am located in the heart of the American Midwest, I’ll give you a method for producing that crisp cucumber pickle and its many country cousins. In addition to cukes, you can apply this method to any number of vegetables, like cauliflower or okra. Green beans make great pickles, and pickled jalapenos are one of life’s piquant pleasures. Turnips are terrific, and when they’re stained hot pink with the addition of fresh beets, they bring a bit of the Middle East to my Midwestern table.
One last thing before we get to a quick, Western-style pickle method: Many of your favorite pickles may be fermented — a slightly different and somewhat long process.
Our method is just a simple brine, whose purpose is flavor as much as it is preservation. Its sour taste comes from vinegar rather than the acids produced by fermentation. As such, it can be ready in less than an hour.