The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
What a pickle
Try making easy bread and butter variety with your bountiful cucumber harvest
It’s been a strange summer in Northeast Ohio for home gardeners — very wet and often quite cool, interspersed with hot, dry, and sunny periods. Tomatoes and corn are late to ripen in many cases, but cucumbers have grown like gangbusters.
“Pickling is a great way to preserve an abundance of cucumbers in summer,” said chef Brian Toomey to a group assembled in a teaching classroom at the International Culinary Arts and Sciences Institute in Chester Township.
Toomey is a kitchen manager for the school, tasked with ordering and purchasing all the fresh ingredients needed by the various professional-level ICASI cooking classes.
“Pickling cucumbers are best,” he said. “But you can use any kind of cucumber. Slice them thin on a mandolin if you have one. But be careful — a mandolin is sharp.”
He was among those teaching brief classes at last month’s ICASI Open House, a daylong event showcasing the facility at 8700 Mayfield Road along with students, graduates and instructors.
Many of them served up small plates beneath canopies around the spacious grounds where demonstrations, games and vendor sales were also underway.
Everything was free of charge, although donations were requested to boost the ICASI scholarship fund.
The professional-level cooking school — affiliated with area universities — has educated many local chefs and elevated the quality of dining throughout the area.
Toomey’s class appealed with a promise to turn cucumbers picked from their vines into quick pickles that can be eaten right away or the next day. Recipes for his Homemade Bread and Butter Pickles were printed and available to take home.
He placed 2 pounds of thinly sliced cucumbers in a large mixing bowl with a thinly sliced onion and mixed them together with one-fourth cup of salt.
“Mixing the salt with the cucumbers and onion will draw out a lot of their water and allow the flavors to mingle,” Toomey said.
Let the mixture sit for about 20 minutes.
Champagne vinegar is what Toomey prefers for the three cups of vinegar called for in the recipe.
“You can also use another red or white vinegar,” he said. “But avoid sherry or balsamic vinegar, which each have their own flavors, and don’t use distilled vinegar.”
The ingredients you use balance the acidity, Toomey said.
“Salt adds acidity and keeps the crunch. You can also use honey or syrup instead of sugar to balance the vinegar, “he said.
The spices added to the pickling liquid also bring their flavors to the pickles.
His recipe calls for celery seed, ground allspice, ground cloves, ground coriander and ground dry mustard, but turmeric, mustard seeds and chilis can be used to increase the heat.
“As you boil together the vinegar and spices, open a window and turn on the fan,” he said. “The scent can be pretty strong.”
He likes to make bread and butter pickles as a condiment for hot dogs, hamburgers and other summer grilled foods, so he avoids using whole spices.
“Whole spices will end up in your pickles and will add their flavors, but you can end up picking them out of your teeth,” he said. “If you use them for their flavors, you can strain them out before adding the sliced cucumbers.”
When adding the cucumbers to the pickling liquid, be sure to also include all the liquid that has seeped out of them, he said.
Once the cucumbers are added to the boiling pickling liquid, turn off the heat and begin stirring the mixture.
“They will continue cooking with the heat off,” Toomey said. “So continue stirring until they are all cooked and turn a darker color.”
The cucumbers need to sit in the pickling liquid for about an hour before being dished up into jars and refrigerated.
They’ll keep for a couple of weeks.
“Pickling is a great way to preserve an abundance of cucumbers in summer.” — Chef Brian Toomey