These gloriously yellow pickles single-handedly set off my canning kick this summer. I tasted a jar of them at a friend’s while cooking other, fresher things, and I immediately knew that I not only had to have the recipe, but I had to have a jar (or two) of my own. This friend then generously offered up her kitchen, and enlisted her canning-pro sister, to churn out a big batch of delight. And delightful they are; by the time these babies are ready (you have to let them sit for at least three weeks before eating), the mixture is practically a chutney, full of sunshiney, golden flavor.

As Liz demonstrated a few weeks ago, canning isn’t actually all that hard. It seems intimidating at first, but once you’ve gathered the basic equipment and given it a few goes, you’ll feel able to whip up a batch of pickles in no time, with no stress. Sunshine pickles are a good place to start, I think, because not only are the ingredients super cheap (so, unlike jam, you don’t have to worry so much about screwing up and wasting precious pints of berries), but I’ve never seen anything like this for sale. And that, really, is the beauty of self-canning: not just thriftiness, but also inventiveness.

I don’t have much else to say about this, which may be because my friend’s sister did a lot of the heavy lifting, in the form of prepping the cucumber. If you do not have a little cucumber prepping elf, then I suggest you pop in a good dvd and hunker down in front of the telly for some veg prep. Otherwise, this is a breeze.

Ah, and nothing more satisfying than hearing the pop, pop, pop of the lids sealing after you take them out of the hot water bath! Get to it.

(And, a helpful hint: if you don’t have enough mason jars for all the pickles, you can also use leftover jars — like the salsa jar below; they just won’t seal, so you’ll have to keep them in the fridge and eat the pickles a little quicker. Poor you.)

Sunshine Pickles

Adapted from the Joy of Pickling

Makes 7 pints

Ingredients

-       7 lb. lemon or pickling cucumbers

-       1 lb. onion, halved and sliced

-       ¼ c. pickling salt (can sub. Kosher salt)

-       21 thin slices fresh, peeled ginger

-       3 ½ c. cider vinegar

-       1 c. water

-       1 c. honey

-       ¼ c. seeded, minced chile pepper

-       2 tbsp. yellow mustard seeds

-       1 tsp. celery seeds

-       1 tsp. ground turmeric

-       1 c. golden raisins

1. Peel, halve, and seed cucumbers. Cut lemon cucumbers into crescents; cut pickling cucumbers into 1-inch chunks. Toss cucumbers and onion with salt. Cover vegetables with ice cubes from 2 ice trays. Let sit 3-5 hours.
2. Drain vegetables. Rinse in cold water, drain well again. Put 3 ginger slices into each of 7 pint mason jars.
3. Using a large, nonreactive pot, bring remaining ingredients to a boil, stirring to dissolve honey. Add drained vegetables and slowly bring mixture to a boil. Ladle hot vegetables and liquid into jars, leaving ½-inch headspace. Close the jars with hot two-piece caps.
4. To ensure a good seal, process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.
5. Store jars in a cool, dry, dark place for at least three weeks before eating pickles.

Bubble, bubble...minus toil and trouble

Let’s first make one thing clear: I’m a big fan of the vinegar pickle.  I love the dilly bean and the pickled corn round and swear I would walk 500 miles (more, even) because I am a junkie for those grossly addictive Zuni café red onion pickles (yes, those pickles.  The good news is there’s no need to walk anywhere. Visit those links! They are a piece of cake to create at home).  Not to mention the many occasions when pickles, snacked on between shots of vodka, have no doubt inoculated against unkind mornings-after.  Mainly, it seems I can’t ever get enough vinegar.  One, let’s say, “uncommon” habit I have is to down cider vinegar mixed with molasses on occasions I’m too lazy to brew coffee, or when I’m in need of a pre-jog pick-me-up.  Probably, it goes without my saying: Any vegetable in vinegar is basically this girl’s dream come true.

Here’s the but: If there’s anything I love more than the vinegar pickle, it’s the lacto-fermented pickle.  Science projects that double as cooking have—for the past couple years—placed high among my preferred pursuits.  These include, but are by no means limited to, sourdough bread baking, kombucha brewing, and yogurt culturing.  Among these, there is nothing quite like watching cabbage bubble up in its crock into sauerkraut and kimchi—and my latest experiment, a Japanese cabbage pickle called “tsukemono.”  There’s something wondrous about lacto-fermentation.  Given a couple days, the bacteria already present on raw cabbage turns some tricks, ups the vitamin C and lactobactilli content, and emerges something greater than the sum of its parts. You shred some cabbage, add salt, and basically that’s it: it practically wants to become sauerkraut for you. It’s like Jimmy Stewart put it, once upon The Philadelphia Story: “Vinegar pickles are a slap on the back. And lacto-fermentation is a heavy mist before my eyes.”  So maybe he was talking about whiskey and champagne, respectively, but lacto-fermentation isn’t so different from bubbly: It’s magical, it’s fortifying, and it will make you giddy.

For reasons beyond understanding, store-bought sauerkraut often contains high fructose corn syrup or other dumb additives.  On top of all this, it costs a small fortune.  Why pay for the jar or refrigerated (often pasteurized! What!) bag when it’s simple—and it really is truly, truly simple—to make your own for pennies?  It’s delicious, for one thing, and ridiculously good for you: it’s rife with vitamins, highly digestible, promotes healthy intestinal flora, boosts your immune system, and can heal your broken heart.

Ways to enjoy your pickled cabbage

• There’s no shame in eating kraut straight out of the jar, but my favorite thing is a sandwich of toasted dark bread—some kind of pumpernickel or dark rye—slathered nearly to excess with mustard, topped with kimchi or sauerkraut and sardines. It is possible to buy the fish in its “skinless and boneless” manifestation, but why do that, when you’d be paying more to miss out on tasty calcium?  What I do is I remove the primary, disorienting, crunchy spine; the rest ain’t no thang.
• Sauerkraut pushed around in a pan with juniper berries and sausage
• Kimchi fried rice: If your kimchi grows “overripe”—meaning too sour for you to bear, what you do is fry it up with some day (or longer)-old rice, throw in frozen peas, cilantro, cumin, soy sauce, eggs, and white pepper.
• Make triangles of toast, top with tsukemono, a raw (if possible) or smoked oyster (recommended: Crown Prince smoked oysters in Olive Oil; steer clear of cottonseed, because it is gross) and as many drops of Tabasco on top as you can stand.
• Drink the kraut juice.  Just do it!  It’s good and good for you.

Japanese sauerkraut a.k.a. Tsukemono

Adapted from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
Makes 1 quart

1 head Napa cabbage, cored and shredded
1 bunch green onions, chopped
2 tablespoons naturally fermented soy sauce
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons whey (if not available, use an additional 1 teaspoon salt)

This is traditionally made with a culture derived from rice bran, but whey serves an identical purpose and is more easily obtained. (You can simply drain it off the top of your yogurt; or if you make your own cheese, you know what to do.) Place all ingredients in a bowl, mix well and pound with a wooden pounder or a meat hammer to release juices.  Place in a quart-sized, wide-mouth mason jar and press down firmly with a pounder or meat hammer until juices come to the top of the cabbage.  The top of the vegetables should be at least 1 inch below the top of the jar.  Cover tightly and keep at room temperature for about 3 days before transferring to cold storage.

Interested in sauerkraut or kimchi? My favorite kimchi instructions come from Greg Cooks: his kimchi tutorial is excellent and simple, and the results ultra tasty.  My sauerkraut advice I get, of course, from Sandorkraut.  Check out his Wild Fermentation forums if you’re afraid of poisoning yourself, but really, you shouldn’t be.