Monday, March 1 2010

In a Pickle

Who doesn't love a pickle? They're sour and crunchy and salty, go great in sandwiches and at picnics and they're a great way to preserve food without refrigeration. According to The Internets:

Pickling, also known as brining or corning, is the process of preserving food by anaerobic fermentation in brine (a solution of salt in water) to produce lactic acid, or marinating and storing it in an acid solution, usually vinegar (acetic acid). The resulting food is called a pickle. This procedure gives the food a salty or sour taste.

Simple enough, and that explains why a slab of cow soaked in salted brine is called 'corned beef'. Pickling is the one of the most ancient way human beings have used to preserve food (first was drying, like beef jerky, next was probably smoking). Every culture has their pickles: South Asians make wonderful oil-based spicy pickles, Scandahoovians pickle herring, the Japanese make tsukemono (the plums are to die for with tempura and beer), Germans have their sauerkraut and Koreans make kimchi (the very word makes me drool, heavenly spicy cabbage goodness!)

Most folks these days buy their pickles and enjoy them without much more thought than dill or bread and butter, and making their own pickles is something mom used to do back in the day. But pickles fascinate me, because of that line 'produce lactic acid'. Lactic acid is produced because bacteria ferment organic matter in solution, driving the pH of the brine down, preventing the growth of spoilage organisms and making the pickles deliciously tart and tangy.

Ferment, you say? My ears tingle at the word. My life is wine, which is all about the fermenting. I've made side trips into beer, bread making, sauerkraut (part of my heritage), and mead making (before I realised I hate everything about mead). It's a natural progression to make my own pickles, and I had another motivation. Good quality pickles are desperately hard to find around here. Oh sure, mass-market pickles are everywhere, but they're made with industrial acetic acid and are all pasteurised, which I believe spoils their texture. Deli pickles can be good, but they're a buck each. It was time, I decided, to make my own.

Step one was to choose an item to pickle. As I mentioned above, other cultures pickle other things, from mushrooms to walnuts and eggs. I settled on cucumbers as they're local, and easy to handle. Plus, that's what I wanted.

According to the wisdom of Grandmothers, the secret key to good pickles is freshness: out of the field and into the pickle barrel for best results. It being February at the time, wee little pickling cukes were in short supply. But lo! My greengrocer had a supply of Japanese cucumbers. Usually destined for maki rolls, these cukes are firm, small-but-not-teensy and in decent supply. I snatched up a few packages.

The next step was to choose a recipe. Rather than do the canning-type pickling which involves boiling vinegar and sousing the innocent items with it before entombing them in a jar I was going to go straight for the briny goodness with a traditional Polish style, soaking them in a high-salt brine. Because I planned to include garlic, the pickles are technically considered Kosher dills, which, contrary to their name are not necessarily produced under Rabbinical supervision (sorry Rabbi Teitlbaum, I'm working without a net here!) but rather are full-sour dills that include lots of garlic. Brined pickles don't last as long as vinegared pickles, but that's just not an issue in my house--I'm going for a useful foodstuff, not a hedge against famine. I chose a very straightforward recipe based on one from Alton Brown. The really important thing about brine is to get the right amount of salt in the brine (too little and the pickles will just rot, too much and they'll be too salty--or may not ferment at all).

Next step, assemble my equipment and spices.

Once assembled I sanitised my equipment using some Aseptox (Americans know it as 'One-Step') which does a fine job at keeping things clean. Sterilisation isn't necessary in this case as we're using the brine environment to suppress other spoilage organisms while encouraging the growth of the lactobacillus--besides, who wants to autoclave a pickle crock?

Next step, wash the pickles and stuff the crock with goodies:

An empty crock is nobodys playground. I cast about the pantry and refrigerator for some substitute players to fill my crock, and I was in luck, with carrots, asparagus and some pepper slices.

The main ingredient of the pickle is salt, and it has to be between 20 and forty grams per litre (3/4 to 1-1/2 oz per quart) to be effective. Instead of Kosher or pickling salt (which are not the same things, a discussion for another day) I chose a Guérande sea salt from France, which immediately lead to a problem: it's wet. Look at the picture below.

The stuff comes in a heavy, slightly tacky mass of coarse grains. Despite a concerted search for the precise water percentage, all I could find was advertising bumf. I decided to guess that it was 5% water, and to hedge my bets I opted for 30 grams per litre, or just over two ounces in the half-gallon of brine I was going to make. After that it was easy: add all the spices to the salt,

Give it a good stir and pour it over the vegetables in the jar.

But wait, you say! Wasn't I making Kosher dills, and if so, where's the garlic? Ha ha ha, it's not like I ever forget garlic! I can repel vampires from miles away, especially those nancy-boy sparkly ones, with the amount of garlic I consume. In it goes!

In the picture on the right you can see all the vegetables making nice and floating about. Because they have a tendency to float up in the brine they need to be weighted to stay under the surface of the liquid. But because the lactic fermentation creates bubbles of carbon dioxide it isn't safe to seal the container. To keep the veg down while allowing the escape of CO2 I use a simple 14-oz 'pint' glass which fits quite neatly into the neck of my crock and is easy to keep clean and sanitary.

And that's it! In a few days the pickles go cloudy with the presence of the lactic bacteria, and for several weeks they tiny little bubbles rise up in the jar. I taste the brining liquid after a week to check progress, and then every couple of days after that. Once I'm satisfied that it's nice and sour, with a fully-developed flavour I usually change the pickles over to a more refrigerator-friendly jar (my crock is really tall) and get to eating 'em.

And how do they taste? Exactly the way I want them to: sour, with a wee bit of sneaky heat layered between the menthol-y notes of peppercorns and the more straightforward warmth of chilies, tangy-sour dill, plenty of mellowed garlic and above all, darn good crunchy-sour picklygoodnesses.

The best thing about making pickles is how stupidly easy it is. Photographing the process took five times longer than making the pickles from beginning to end (which is usually only five minutes, including the time it takes to find my scale and my measuring cup) and writing about it for this blog entry was ten times harder. If you've ever considered making your own pickles, now is the time to throw off the yoke of corporate pickle domination! You have nothing to lose but your dills!

Ahem. That was the pickles talking. Next up, I'm going to make salami. Stay tuned.

Posted by Full-Kosher Tim AT 11:29PM

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