Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

From the 2008 batch. chili ginger, dill, tarragon, basil garlic

Who doesn’t have truckloads of zucchinis in the summer? Bread and butter pickles traditionally use cucumbers, but zucchinis work just as well. The following will fill 3 quart jars. This is a non water-bath method.

Ingredients:

• 6 lb of vegetables, e.g. 5 1/2 lb of zucchini and 1/2 lb of onion. Or all zucchini and no onion.

• 3 1/4 c vinegar (I like plain old white, to let the other flavors shine through) 
• 2 c sugar (this is less than most other recipes, and the pickles still turn out sweet)
About 1/4 c of salt
• 1 tray of ice cubes
• 1 T mustard seeds
• 1 T fennel seeds
• For herb/spice variations, scroll down

Directions:

1. Slice the veges. Small enough they will fit easily through the mouths of the jars, large enough they aren’t a pain to get out when you want to eat them.
2. Mix the veges up in a large bowl with the salt. Distribute the ice cubes on top. Alternatively, if your bowl fits in the fridge, put it there.
3. Allow the veges to sit for about 3 hours or more. Overnight is okay. This step of soaking in salt is what makes the final pickles crisp instead of mushy.
4. In the meantime, set everything else up. You will need:

• A large pot. A 6 quart pot is a good size for this amount of food.
• 3 quart jars (or the equivalent in smaller wide-mouth jars) plus their good metal lids. Do not use lids that have any signs of rust, or dings, or are bent.
• A pair of metal tongs.
• A large serving spoon, plus another spoon (regular size okay).
• A smaller pot for boiling water.
• An oven.
• An area where you can ladle the hot pickle mixture into the jars without lifting it too high. I use the kitchen sink.
   

Prepare the tools

About ½ an hour before you are ready to drain the salt-soaking veges, prepare the tools:

• Wash the jars and their lids. Rinse and drain them, then put them upright in the oven. Set the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Put the jar-lids in there also, spread out and not touching. This sterilizes the jars, and dries them, too.
• Put your tongs, serving spoon, and the other spoon in a pot of water, enough to cover the round part of the spoons. Boil these on high for at least 3 minutes of rolling boil. This sterilizes these instruments so that you can use them to touch the pickle mixture, and the sterile jars.
   

Now you can start cooking.

1. In the large pot put the vinegar and sugar. Heat on medium till sugar is dissolved. Add the spices (but not the herbs – see below).
2. Now drain all the salty water from the chopped veges. Even if you didn’t start with ice cubes, there will be a lot of water, and the veges will have shrunk. I also give them a single rinse in cold water, just to reduce a little of the salt. But don’t let them sit in fresh water, or they will re-absorb it all again.
3. Bring the vinegar mixture to the boil. When at a rolling boil, pour in the drained veges. At first it might look like there is not enough vinegar, but they will shrink down some more.
4. Now remove the sterilized tools from the boiling water, and place them upright in something like a tall glass or a dishrack. The point is to have a place to put them where their sterilized parts don’t touch any surfaces.
5. Now bring the vinegar plus veges back to the boil. Because of the volume of veges, this actually takes a few minutes. During this time, set up your jars.
6. Using the tongs, take the hot, sterile jars out of the oven. Place each jar in the sink. Don’t do this too early, because you don’t want too many airborne bacteria floating into them.
7. Stir the veges often. As soon as they come back to a boil, they are ready to put into the jars.
8. Bring the pot over to the sink. Using the large serving spoon, spoon the pickle mixture into the jars. The other sterile spoon is for those occasions when a piece of vege gets stuck on the large spoon, or threatens to fall down the outside of a jar. You may not need an extra spoon at all, but it’s sad to see good pickle mixture go to waste because you can’t nudge it in the right direction with your unsterile fingers, and it falls into the sink.
9. When the jars are full, pour in extra liquid. Fill to within a half inch of the top.
10. If necessary, wipe the outside threads with a paper towel. Don’t let it touch the inside anywhere. 

Finishing up.

1. Now get the lids out of the oven using the tongs. Seal each jar. You may need to hold them with a dish towel because of the heat. After about 5 minutes, try turning the lids again, and there may be some more tightening to do.
2. Let the jars cool. Over the next few hours you will hear the popping sound of the lids contracting as the seals set.
3. Put the jars away for at least 3 weeks. Something happens to the chemical balance that matures the flavor over this time.

And that’s it. If you’ve been careful about how clean everything is, you won’t need to water-bath them. They keep for months in a dark cupboard. I have not kept any longer than a year, so I don’t know their long-term shelf-life, but I have never had a problem. Needless to say, if there’s a lid that doesn’t contract (i.e. ‘button’ is still up), it’s not sealed. You can keep it in the fridge and treat it like an open bottle of salad dressing. But the pickles won’t have matured, so won’t be as delicious.

And needless to say, if any go a funky color, or have mold on top when you open them, or the lid bulges outwards, then throw them away. But like I said, I have never had that happen.

Herb/spice variations

Add in any combination of sliced chili peppers, garlic, dill, cilantro, tarragon, cayenne, paprika, basil, sliced ginger. The flavors that seems to add the most are tarragon and ginger.

I treat whole fresh herbs separately. They are washed, and then right after I put the sterile jars in the sink, and take the spoons etc out of their boiling water, I dunk the herbs in for about 30 seconds to 1 minute into the same boiling water. Then I spoon the herbs into the clean jars. This is before I put the pickle mixture in. So put the blanched herbs into the jars before ladling in the pickle mixture. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 8:22 pm and is filed under The Bricoleur's Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.