Black Currant–Sausage Pinchos

Posted on January 9, 2013 by

currant & sausage pinchos
When I offer samples of fruit pastes at fairs and other public events, people always ask me how to serve them. I tell them about the Spanish custom of eating quince paste with cheese. I say that Middle Easterners often serve fruit pastes with nuts, and sometimes incorporate nuts in the paste. I suggest taking fruit pastes on camping and car trips, and serving squares of paste along with other sweets on holiday platters.

But black currant paste, I figure, needs special attention, because it’s extraordinarily tart and aromatic. When I opened some recently and asked Robert how we should have it, he immediately thought of smoke and paprika.

And so we made hors d’oeuvres—or pinchos, I guess I should say, because we used Spanish-style dry-cured chorizo, from Chop, a new charcuterie in Portland, along with smoky, juicy sausage from Overseas Taste, a Russian market also in Portland. And we didn’t eat our tidbits as an appetizer; along with sweet potato fries, they looked like dinner to me. Robert threw in a green salad, with sliced Asian pears, still crisp and juicy, though I picked them two months ago, and his roasted hazelnut oil.

The currant paste complemented the paprika-rich chorizo and the smoky fried sausage equally well. What a satisfying meal!

In case you have no currant paste on hand, here’s a recipe to try next summer, or a year or two after that, if you haven’t planted your currant bushes yet. (Do plant at least one black currant bush, if your climate allows. You won’t regret it.)

Black Currant Paste

1½ pounds black currants
½ cup water
2 cups sugar

Combine the currants and water in a saucepan. Simmer the currents, covered, for 15 minutes. Press them through the fine screen of a food mill; this will remove many but probably not all of the seeds.

In a preserving pan, combine the currant purée and the sugar. Heat the mixture slowly until the sugar dissolves. Raise the heat, and boil the mixture for about 15 minutes, stirring, until it pulls away from the side of the pan and the trail made by the spoon at the bottom of the pan remains clear for a few seconds.

Spread the hot mixture about ¾ inch thick in small, straight-sided glass or ceramic molds (I use two 5-by-7-inch Pyrex dishes). When the paste is cool, turn it out onto a rack, and let it dry thoroughly in a dehydrator or another warm, dry place.

Store the paste wrapped first in parchment paper and then in plastic.

Posted in Fruits, Sweet preserves | Tagged , | 6 Comments

The Tomato Report 2012

Posted on January 3, 2013 by

Seed catalogs have been arriving in my mailbox for two months now, and in another two months tomato seedlings will be coming up in the greenhouse. For all of us northerners who start our summer vegetables from seed, it’s time to consider which varieties to order, or re-order, or beg from friends in the next few weeks. For my record and, I hope, a little help with your own choices, here is the fourth installment of my annual Tomato Report. For reports from prior years, click here.

Although we had another cool summer in 2012, unusually dry, warm weather in September and October made for an abundant and disease-free tomato harvest. All the varieties that produced well in 2011 did so again in 2012. This year’s report focuses on  two varieties that were new to my garden as well as the year’s standouts.

indigo rose, croppedIndigo Rose, a new selection from Jim Myers of Oregon State University, is a large cherry tomato that’s purple—eggplant purple, not muddy purple like a “black” tomato—with a green patch on the bottom side. When the tomato ripens, the green patch turns orange-red. My single plant set fruit early, but the fruits hung hard on the vine all summer before finally ripening in early October. Harvest was a bit of trouble, since I had to either lay on the ground looking up to see the red patches or else palpate each tomato. Although the fruits looked pretty in mixed-tomato salads, their flavor was uninteresting. If I grow Indigo Rose again, I’ll try it in a green-tomato pickle.

Developed by Jim Baggett at Oregon State University, Siletz produces medium-size red tomatoes, supposedly very reliably in our region. My friend Sally started my single Siletz plant. Although it was bigger and sturdier and quicker to set fruit than all the seedlings I started myself, the fruits were few and slow to ripen. I may try this cultivar again another year.

Jersey Devil tomatoJersey Devil ripened well this year, unlike in 2011. This horn-shaped tomato, about 5 inches long, has deep red, very meaty flesh that’s surprisingly sweet and tart.

Anna Russian was once again my biggest producer of large tomatoes. (See a description of this oxheart tomato in my 2011 report. My friend Sally, who grew Anna Russian for the first time this year, has great success with it as well.

Again I grew loads of Jaune Flamme, the French heirloom with the creamy orange-yellow flesh. For some reason many of the fruits were quite small, not much larger than an inch in diameter. Could Jaune Flamme have crossed with a yellow cherry? I don’t see how.

My other big producer, as usual, was little Juliet. (See my 2009 report).

Varieties I may try for the first time in 2013 include two I tasted at the home of my friend Lisa: Sungold, a yellow cherry tomato with a tropical tang, and Purple Cherokee, a delicious black tomato similar to Carbon. I may also try a tomato recommended by Martin Smith: Ramapo, an old hybrid from Rutgers University. And I must get some more seeds of Black Prince (see my 2011 report), which I missed last year.

Posted in Vegetables | Tagged | 13 Comments

For the Last Preserves of the Year: The Humble Citron Melon

Posted on December 26, 2012 by

citron melonI first learned about watermelon’s pale-fleshed, seedy ancestor while studying traditional ways of preserving modern watermelon. Why, I wondered, do people bother to make the watermelon’s narrow inner white rind into pickles and sweet preserves when the red flesh and the seeds have much more nutritional value and flavor? Was the white layer proportionally bigger in watermelons of the past? And what is a pie melon? Did Southerners actually make pies out of a sort of watermelon?

Soon I was reading about the citron melon, the native African watermelon from which our garden varieties were developed. Citron melons grow wild in many hot places today, including the southern United States. Green Deane describes them growing in Florida citrus groves, though the melon wasn’t named for this preferred habitat.* Wild citron melons are said to be usually bland-tasting, but sometimes they’re sweet or bitter. Cultivated varieties are always bland. “Pie melons” can be citron melons or crosses between citron melons and sweet watermelons.

That much I learned from other writers, but I wanted to experience this fruit for myself. So when I found a listing for red-seeded citron melon in the Seed Savers Exchange catalog in 2011, I had to send for some seeds.

I couldn’t grow melons of any sort in the cool, short summer of 2011, but this year I did better. My single citron melon vine produced several round fruits, each no more than 7 inches in diameter and striped dark green on a pale green background. I picked the melons at the first frost of the year, in early October, and hoped that they would keep well on the cool tile floor of our entry hall while I spent the next several weeks canning and drying tomatoes, peppers, apples, and pears. Later I would try making some citron melon preserves, which are just like watermelon rind preserves except that you use all of the melon except for the hard outer rind and the seeds.

In early November one of my readers, Val, suggested that I have a look at a blog post by a writer in southern France concerning “jamming melons,” or melons d’Espagne. In Médoc, writes Mimi Thorisson, everybody makes confiture with these melons just after harvest, in early November. She suggests two variations on the basic confiture, one with vanilla and one with mandarin orange and ginger. Her recipe, I noticed, closely resembles American recipes for citron melon preserves. In her photos, the melons d’Espagne look just like my citron melons.

I consulted other French sources. Some French writers say the melons are harvested in late fall and kept in a cool place until just after Christmas, when they are made into the last preserves of the year. All the French recipes I found are much like both Mimi’s and the American recipes. If melons d’Espagne and red-seeded citron melon aren’t exactly the same variety, they must be very close.

I cut into one of the melons. Inside, it fit the French descriptions. The flesh was pale green and bland tasting. It felt slimy, like aloe. The red seeds were many, large, and hard in comparison with seeds of the sweet watermelon cultivars I know.

I worked out a recipe to suit myself. I didn’t add an apple or chop the melon in a food processor, as one French recipe specifies. This would give a jammy result, and I wanted to make preserves, that is, bite-size pieces of fruit in heavy syrup. I didn’t use the alum called for in some Southern recipes, to give the melon a brittle (and, to me, odd) texture. Instead of choosing either vanilla or orange, as Mimi suggests, I combined the two, as in other recipes.

I used half of a vanilla bean, and the flavor was overwhelming. So in the recipe that follows I call for only a quarter of a bean and offer the option of using ginger instead, as I’ll do next time. If you prefer vanilla to ginger, you might also follow another French tradition: Add a splash of dark rum at the end of cooking.

Citron Melon Preserves

For this recipe you’ll need a melon about 6 inches in diameter or else a piece of a larger melon. Cut the melon in half, and cut each half into narrow wedges. Poke or pry out all of the seeds. Peel each wedge with a knife, and then cut the wedge into pieces ½ to ¾ inch wide.

citron melon preserves3 pounds prepared citron melon pieces
2 clementines
Juice of 1 lemon
1½ pounds sugar
¼ vanilla bean, split lengthwise and slivered crosswise, or 1 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled, sliced thin, and slivered

Put the melon pieces into a preserving pan. Halve the clementines, squeeze out their juice, and add the clementine juice and the lemon juice to the pan.  Scrape out any membranes and stringy white bits from the clementine peels, slice the peels into thin strips, and add them to the pan. Add the sugar and the vanilla bean or ginger pieces. Stir gently, cover the pan, and let the mixture rest overnight.

Set the pan over medium heat, and stir gently until the sugar is dissolved. Raise the heat to medium-high, and boil the mixture, uncovered, for about 40 minutes. When the preserves are ready, there will appear to be more fruit than liquid in the pan. The fruit will be partially translucent, and the syrup will form a thread when dropped into a glass of cold water.

Ladle the preserves into sterilized half-pint mason jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace. Add lids and rings, and process the jars in a boiling-water bath for 5 minutes.

Note that the syrup will probably jell, but slowly, over a period of days.

Serve the preserves on toast, biscuits, pancakes, or ice cream.

Makes about 4 half-pints

Now, shall I try a citron melon pie? An Aussie named Linda offers a recipe here.

 

*Nor does the melon taste like citron; it isn’t tart at all. Instead, its English name derives from its generic name, Citrullus, which was first applied to its cousin colocynth, or Citrullus colocynthis, a plant that loves very dry as well as hot conditions. Ripe colocynth fruits on the vine look like oranges scattered about on the ground, as if somebody’s shopping bag had ripped in the middle of the desert. Citrullus colocynthis was once a highly valued medicine, traded throughout the Old World for its purgative effect, despite its horribly bitter taste.

Posted in Fruits, Sweet preserves | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Un Blog Affidabile

Posted on December 12, 2012 by

blog_affidabileThe most enjoyable part of keeping a WordPress blog, to my mind, is checking your blog’s statistics to see where in the world your most recent readers live. Although many of my international readers probably lack enough facility with English to leave their comments, and some may come upon my blog accidentally, they’re still my readers, or at least my brief visitors. It’s nice to know that in some slight way my blogging may be affecting lives all over the world.

I’m musing about what an international free-for-all blogging has become because of my two recent nominations for blogging awards. Both nominations are from “allotment” gardeners (which means, I think, that they have community garden plots), but one is in Australia and the other in Britain. And one of the awards apparently originated in Italy.

I’ve reluctantly turned down the Very Inspiring Blogging Award, because it would have required my answering a lot of questions and finding fifteen other bloggers to nominate. But I’ll happily accept Il Blog Affidabile, “The Reliable Blog” award.

Un Blog Affidabile must fit this description:

1. The blog is updated regularly.
2. The blogger shows genuine passion for the topic.
3. The blogger promotes the sharing and the active participation of readers.
4. The blogger provides content and information which is useful and original.
5. The blog is not packed with too much advertising.

A winning blogger must do the following:
1. Thank the nominating blogger and provide a link to that person’s blog.
2. Add the Affidabile logo to the winning blog, in a post, widget, or page.
3. Describe when and why the blog was begun.
4. Nominate five other blogs for the award.
5. Let the bloggers know they have been nominated.

To meet the latter criteria, I offer the following information:

The Gardener’s Table was nominated for Il Blog Affidabile by Debbi Love. At digginwivdebb, you can learn about what Debbi has been growing in her allotment.

I started this blog about three years ago. Besides serving the purpose described under “About This Blog,” it is a repository of material for future editions of my preserving books and, possibly, other future books.

All but one of the blogs I’m about to nominate is international in one way or another. Allison of Spontaneous Tomato writes about the foods of the various countries she has lived in and visited, in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. Ting Gough of Playing with Food was born in Laos, grew up in various Asian countries, and now writes about preparing the food she grows in New Hampshire. Meg Bortin of Everyday French Chef is a long-time American journalist living in Paris and Burgundy who writes about French home cooking. Kate of Kate’s Creative Space is a young, British, new-and-improved Martha Stewart. Most foreign of all the bloggers in this bunch, to me, is the American who has always lived in America: Green Deane of Eat the Weeds. Through his blog he shares his amazing store of knowledge about the edible wild plants of Florida, which to someone from the Pacific Northwest is a very exotic place. Please check out each of these blogs. You’ll find them most affidabile.

Posted in Books and blogs, Vegetables, Wild foods | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Easy, Tasty Roasted Sliced Quince

Posted on December 10, 2012 by

quincesI’ve been failing in my efforts to get people excited about quinces. I took baskets of handsome quinces to sell along with my jams at two events this fall, but everyone wanted my Asian pears instead. I’d say, “Smell this!” And I’d push a big, beautiful yellow quince at their noses. Most described the fragrance as wonderful or heavenly or pineapple-like. A boy not quite old enough to walk or talk wrinkled his nose at an Asian pear but tried to take a big bite of the quince. I offered tastes of quince paste at one event and quince jelly at another, and the samples provoked more enthusiastic comments and questions. But when I said the fruit should be cooked, faces fell and turned away. Nobody wanted to go to the trouble of cooking quinces into jelly, jam, or paste. Even baking the fruit like apples or poaching it in wine seemed too difficult.

“Why didn’t you suggest roasting them?” Robert asked, when I came home from the second event with a nearly full basket of quinces. I hadn’t thought of that. It was exactly what I should have done.

Everybody seems to be roasting vegetables these days. You come home in the evening, turn on the oven, and slice, salt, and oil whatever starchy vegetables are at hand. You put the pan in the hot oven and read the mail and listen to the messages on the answering machine and before you know it your dinner is nearly ready; you barely have time to fry some sausages or fish fillets to accompany the veggies.

Think of quince as another vegetable for roasting. For Thanksgiving this year, I combined quinces with orange- and white-fleshed sweet potatoes and Purple Haze carrots—each ingredient sweet but uniquely textured, with the quince providing a welcome tart note. All the flavors were heightened by the drying effect of the oven heat.

roasted quince and carrots

Roasted quince and carrots, with rosemary

Before quince season ends, please try this: Half and core a quince or two—don’t bother peeling it—and slice it into wedges about 1 inch thick. Choose a vegetable or two to accompany the quince. Cut sweet potatoes, peeled if you prefer, into pieces about the same size. Cut carrots, if they’re long or thick, into pieces about ½ inch thick. Other vegetables you might try include parsnips (sliced like big carrots), potatoes (whole fingerlings or cut large tubers) and onions or shallots (sliced if they’re large). Put the quince and vegetables into a roasting pan, and, if you like, add an herb sprig or two. Toss the mixture with a little oil, spread the pieces into a single layer, and salt and pepper them. Roast them at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for about 45 minutes, turning them after the first 20 minutes or so. Serve them hot.

This is not only an easy way for working people to feed themselves well; it’s also an impressive dish for company, an effective way to get children to eat fruit and vegetables, and an opportunity for even babies to learn that quinces can taste just as good as they smell.

Posted in Fruits, Vegetables | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Pommé: Breton Apple Butter

Posted on December 7, 2012 by

A jar of pommé, with the last of this year’s Braeburns

I first learned of this traditional preserve of Brittany from a travel guide. In our subsequent trip to Brittany, last spring, my family and I searched the grocery stores and gift shops for pommé. Some people we talked with mentioned a traditional bread or pastry called pommé, but none had heard of the confiture. We thought we’d found what we were looking for at a festival in Dol-de-Bretagne, but the pommé there turned out to be bread with apple filling.

Though apparently once very popular in the eastern, traditionally Gallo-speaking part of Brittany, pommé the preserve is little known today. It rarely appears in shops catering to tourists. As I learned with further research from home, pommé is still prepared, sold, and consumed mainly in the countryside.

Pommé is none other than apple butter, usually made without spices or added sugar, so that a spoonful offers a full taste of the caramelization that occurs with long cooking along with concentrated natural fruit sugars and acids. For farmers in the pays Gallo, making pommé was an excuse for a party. Each autumn, they would empty a barrel of fresh cider into a copper cauldron and add peeled, cored, and cut apples. Family members and neighbors would take turns stirring for twelve hours or longer until the apples had broken down and the cider had condensed to make a thick, brick-red, glossy jam. Once the apples were in the pot, everyone but the person stirring would sing and dance to the music of an accordion player or fiddler.

 Pommé was sometimes called le beurre du pauvre, the butter of the poor, because when you couldn’t afford to buy butter, or needed to sell all your homemade butter for cash, you could spread your bread with pommé instead. This made pommé especially popular during the world wars. After World War II, though, butter was more affordable, and so was the refined sugar for making modern jams. Pommé was nearly forgotten.

In the 1970s, residents of the villages of Bazouges-la-Pérouse and Tremblay began to revive the custom of the ramaougerie (“stirring”) de pommé as a public event, complete with live music, sales of artisanal goods, and cider pressings. The finished pommé is packed into jars and sold to the crowd.

Making pommé in a small batch at home is a less festive but also less time-consuming affair. Constant stirring isn’t actually necessary until the cooking is mostly done. This is how I’ve made pommé:

Small-Batch Pommé

1 gallon sweet cider
5 pounds cored, peeled, and quartered apples

In a big, wide, heavy-bottomed pot (mine holds 7.5 liters), begin heating the cider. Add the quartered apples—you can do this gradually, if you like—and simmer the mixture, stirring occasionally. When the apples have broken down and the pommé starts to spatter, stir it constantly for about 10 minutes, until it has thickened and darkened.  The finished pommé will be glossy and a warm red-brown. The total cooking time should be about 4 hours.

Ladle the pommé into pint or half-pint mason jars. Add lids and rings, and process the jars in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.

Makes about 4 pints

Posted in Fruits, Sweet preserves | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

A Hot Pepper for Cool Climes

Posted on November 29, 2012 by

When my faithful correspondent Sheila offered to send me seeds of a pepper variety called hinkelhatz, I didn’t bother to ask what a hinkelhatz pepper was. Every pepper variety, I figure, is worth trying at least once. As I laid the seeds on damp paper towels and later planted the sprouted seeds in pots in the greenhouse, I wondered what the fruit would be like, but I didn’t bother to research the question. And when I set the little plants out in the garden, again, I was too busy to look up a description.

It wasn’t until I idly picked and bit what I took to be an extra-small shishito that I learned what I’d planted. I screamed, spit, and tore to the house, drooling all the way, to salve my burning tongue with a big spoonful of sour cream. Hinkelhatz peppers are hot!

I grow many varieties of peppers, but with our cool summer temperatures of the past few years the chiles have sadly developed little heat. And our summers are simply too short for most reliably fiery varieties, such as habanero, to produce mature fruits. So the hinkelhatz was a big surprise.

Because it has been grown for well over 150 years by a small group of Pennsylvania Mennonites, the hinkelhatz has been added to the Slow Food Ark of Taste. The name of this pepper—“chicken heart” in Pennsylvania Dutch—aptly describes its size (1½ to 2 inches long) and shape (somewhat conical but blunt-ended and slightly furrowed). The hinkelhatz starts out the same pale green color of the slighter longer—and never hot—shishito. Some Pennsylvania Mennonites grow a yellow hinkelhatz, but the commoner type, which I had, ripens orange-red. This description may remind you of the habanero, but the hinkelhatz has none of the habanero’s characteristic aroma. Just the heat.

When the first frosts came in early October, very few of my hinkelhatzes had ripened. I stored them in a box in our unheated guest bedroom, and I waited.

In mid-November, a few of the peppers had begun to rot; it was time to use the rest. Many were still fully green, so I put them in brine to ferment. About a third had ripened. These I would use in the way that Slow Food says the Pennsylvania Dutch do, as pepper vinegar.

The term pepper vinegar usually refers to vinegar that’s flavored by stuffing a jar full of hot peppers, pouring vinegar over, and letting it slowly draw out the peppers’ fire and flavor. Pepper vinegar of this sort is a common condiment in the West Indies and southeastern United States.

But Slow Food describes the Pennsylvania Dutch pepper vinegar as made from cooked and puréed peppers. So I created what might be better called a pepper sauce, in this way:

Hinkelhatz Pepper Sauce

1 pound hinkelhatz peppers, tops cut off
½ cups cider vinegar (5 percent)
1 teaspoon fine salt

Grind the ingredients together in a blender or food processor until the peppers appear minced (not puréed).  In a saucepan, simmer the mixture for 10 minutes. Press it through the fine screen of a food mill. Funnel the sauce into a bottle, and store it in the refrigerator.

Makes about 1 pint

The sauce turned out a beautiful vermilion and, as expected, quite hot. It seems strange that Pennsylvania Dutch folks, with their sugar- and vinegar-rich but otherwise bland cookery, would favor hot sauce of any kind, much less this kind. According to Slow Food, the Mennonites who grow hinkelhatz peppers sprinkle pepper vinegar on their sauerkraut. I wish someone could tell the story of how this pepper arrived in Pennsylvania, presumably—though probably not directly—from Mexico, and how it came to be treasured and passed on through generations in a community of Mennonite farmers.

I thank those farmers for passing the hinkelhatz on to the rest of the world.  Seeds for the red type are now available from many garden seed companies, which you can find with a quick Internet search.

Posted in Vegetables | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

A Good Use for Thick-Skinned Little Peppers

Posted on November 25, 2012 by

For me, November’s vegetable of the month isn’t sweet potato or even winter squash; it’s capsicum pepper. I pick my peppers when the first frost hits, usually in early October, and then let I them ripen in baskets and boxes in an unheated bedroom until those that will ripen have done so. Most take a few weeks to turn red, yellow, orange, or brown. As the fruits ripen, I freeze them, dry them, pickle them, and make them into various kinds of hot sauces and relishes. And I spend a lot of time roasting them.

Sometimes I do this outdoors, over a wood or charcoal fire, to infuse the peppers with smoke. Other times I use the oven broiler, or I char the peppers over a stovetop flame. In each case, I let the blackened peppers steam in a plastic bag or cloth for a while, and then I rub off the skins. These techniques all remove unpleasantly tough skins and make the flesh pliable, so the peppers fold nicely into a pickle jar or freezer bag.

But high-temperature roasting doesn’t work well with small peppers; their flesh tends to burn away along with the skin. So this year I wondered what to do with my boxful of corno di toro peppers—sweet, fleshy, thick-skinned red peppers which are supposed to grow at least 8 inches long but after several years of seed saving were now, for some reason, no longer than 5 inches. They were too big to look pretty in a pickle jar. I could dry them, if I halved them first, but I had plenty of dried peppers of other varieties. So I decided to roast the corni di toro, but slowly. I spread some peppers in a single layer on a roasting pan and set them in an oven heated to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. I turned them occasionally as they cooked, but much less often than I would if I were charring them over a stove flame or under a broiler flame. As the peppers softened, I let them blacken in spots, but not overmuch.

puréeing peppersAs usual, I steamed the roasted peppers in a plastic bag. This loosened the skins, but peeling more than five pounds of little peppers still seemed too much work. So I pulled off the tops of the peppers and put the rest through the medium screen of a food mill. What a smooth and delicious bowl of pepper purée this produced!

What should I do with it? I could make puréed pepper soup, a ketchup with or without tomatoes, or a rich-flavored sauce for pasta or meat. Instead I decided to turn the whole bowl of purée into a kind of harissa, the North African condiment that’s usually made with dried peppers.

Here is my recipe for—

Harissa from Fresh Puréed Peppers

1 tablespoon caraway seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
8 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon salt
1 quart fresh pepper purée
½ cup olive oil
½ cup diced brined lemon (1 small or ½ large)

Toast the caraway, cumin, and coriander seeds in a small skillet until they release their aromas, and then grind the seeds and garlic in a mortar. Stir the ground mixture into the pepper purée. Stir in the salt, olive oil, and brined lemon. (If you prefer a smoother sauce, you might leave out the lemon or use a little grated lemon peel instead.)

Divide the harissa among small containers, top each with a little olive oil and a tight-fitting lid, and freeze all but one container. Refrigerate the last container to use over the next few days.

Harissa adds a delicious richness to soups, stews, and pasta sauces. I also like it as a sandwich spread, with or without a little vinegar added. My favorite way to use harissa, though, is to toss it with home-cured green Lucques olives and more bits of brined lemon. That was my favorite among this year’s Thanksgiving hors d’oeuvres.

Posted in Vegetables | Tagged | Leave a comment

Uses for Pickle Brine, Part II

Posted on November 8, 2012 by

As American bartenders have grown increasingly inventive in recent years, some have taken inspiration from the pickle jar on the bar. The dirty martini—a martini with a bit of olive brine added—has long been a bartending favorite. But now, all over the United States, bars are serving new drinks with names like pickleback, dirty pickle, picklet, and pickletini.

Joe and Bob McClure, who learned to make pickles from their Michigan grandparents and now produce them commercially in Detroit, claim that the pickleback originated in Brooklyn, New York, in 2006, when the two brothers were storing early batches of their pickles in the cellar of a gritty bar called the Bushwick Country Club. The story goes that one of the bartenders drank some pickle brine just after downing a shot of whiskey, and he liked the combination. So he tried it on customers, and they liked it, too. Soon the pickleback spread to other Brooklyn bars.

In the spring of 2010, the world of cocktail journalism was abuzz with news of the pickleback. One bartender, T. J. Lynch, told a reporter that he usually offered a chaser of house-made pickle brine whenever anyone ordered Jameson Irish whiskey.  Not every customer was grateful; “It’s fun to watch them suffer if they don’t like it,” Lynch said. He’d been serving so many picklebacks, he told another reporter, that he’d had to start giving away the pickles.

What’s the attraction of a pickle-brine chaser for whiskey? Blogger Jake Jamieson was initially disgusted at the thought, but he later found a pickleback to be “pretty excellent” with the brine of Claussen half-sours. Pickle juice “does a remarkably smooth job of cutting the fire off straight Jameson,” wrote Justin Rocket Silverman. Toby Cecchini, after following a shot of Old Crow bourbon with a shot of brine from a jar of McClure’s dills, wrote that the taste was “shockingly good”; the brine left “a snappy, savory tang that curled about the last remnants of the smoky bourbon.” Lance Mayhew, a Portland bartender, liked the “rich, umami flavor” pickle juice left on his palate after a shot of Jameson’s but warned that a pickleback with any other whiskey was “disastrous” (Lance drank his picklebacks along with light lager beer). In the Washington Post, finally, Jason Wilson concluded that that“brine and whiskey made one of those mysteriously wonderful combinations, and it doesn’t hurt that pickle juice is second to none in preventing dehydration.” If nothing else, then, drinking pickle brine along with hard liquor helps to prevent a hangover.

Since all that excited press in 2010, picklebacks and pickle-juice cocktails have become ordinary barroom drinks. David Buchanan, who suggested the topic of this post, says they are particularly popular in casinos.

Fermented Brine in Bar Drinks?

Apparently, the pickle juice in a pickleback is normally vinegar-based. Considering the growing popularity of fermented vegetables, I wondered if some bartenders had begun using the cloudy brines naturally soured by lactic-acid-producing bacteria. In fact, by 2010 Erica Christ of the Black Forest Inn, in Minneapolis, was making krautinis, using sauerkraut brine combined with mild frozen gin and kümmel, a sweet liqueur flavored with caraway, cumin, and fennel. I’d have a hard time getting kümmel if I wanted to duplicate this weird concoction, which I don’t. I’m more interested in fermented cucumber brine. How does it taste in picklebacks and cocktails? Are any bartenders using it?

A search of the Web didn’t turn up any examples, so I decided to experiment at home. Because I’ve drunk cocktails about three times in my life, I needed a more qualified taster. I sent my husband to the liquor store for gin, vermouth, and vodka. Then I poured him a spoonful of fermented cucumber brine, and he had himself a—

Dirty Pickle Martini

3 ounces (6 tablespons) gin
1 ounce (2 tablespoons) dry vermouth
1 teaspoon chilled brine from fermented cucumber pickles

Combine the gin, vermouth, and pickle brine in a cocktail glass, and stir. Garnish with a small cucumber pickle.

That was delightful, Robert said. With his help I next devised a—

Bloody Mary Mixer with Fermented Pickle Brine
Makes 8 servings

For this recipe, you want tomato purée that’s just slightly thicker than it usually comes from fresh tomatoes. The purée of meaty tomatoes, such as Romas, would be perfect. If your purée is thinner and separated, you might pour off the clear liquid and use just the thicker stuff that remains. Commercially canned tomato “juice” (unreduced purée) would serve well enough, too.

1 quart unreduced but moderately thick tomato purée
¾ cup brine from fermented cucumbers
2 tablespoons brine from fermented hot peppers, or substitute hot pepper sauce such as Tabasco
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon finely ground black pepper
2 teaspoons finely grated horseradish
1 teaspoon celery seeds

In a jar or pitcher, stir together the tomato purée, cucumber brine, hot pepper brine (or hot pepper sauce), Worcestershire sauce, and black pepper. Tie the horseradish and celery seeds in a spice bag or scrap of cheesecloth, and immerse it in the mixture. Cover the container, and refrigerate it for one to two days.

When you’re ready to serve the drinks, squeeze and remove the spice bag, and stir the mixer. Fill each highball glass halfway with ice. Add 2 ounces (1/4 cup) of vodka and 4 ounces (1/2 cup) of Bloody Mary mixer to each glass. Stir, garnish with a long pickle spear, and serve.

I would have liked this drink well enough, I think, without the vodka. Robert had to empty my glass after finishing his own.

Now the question is this: Does the probiotic bacteria in the pickle brine survive the poisonous alcohol long enough to do your tummy any good? Only Robert’s intestinal flora know for sure.

 

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Uses for Pickle Brine, Part I

Posted on November 8, 2012 by

What do you do with the brine when you empty your pickle jar? At my house, we go through so many pickles that I often guiltily dump the brine down the drain.

Pickle brine has seldom gone to waste in Eastern Europe. Russians have long used it as a wrinkle-preventing skin treatment. In A Taste of Russia, Darra Goldstein writes that her grandmother rubbed pickle brine into her unlined face every morning. In Polish Heritage Cookery, Robert and Maria Strybel offer various Polish recipes that call for pickle brine, including a barszcz (borscht) made of grated pickles sautéed in butter and combined with bouillon, smoked kielbasa, grated baked beets, and sour cream, and another soup of pickles, potatoes, and pork stock with sour cream. Pickle brine is a traditional Polish hangover remedy as well, say the Strybels: Fill a glass with equal parts chilled pickle brine and ice-cold club soda, and drink the mixture down at once.

Goldstein and the Strybels are referring, of course, to fermented pickles, which are suddenly more popular than ever before in the United States. Like many of today’s fermentation faddists, chef Monica Corrado believes that the lactobacilli in pickle brine can keep a person healthy. “So if you get a stomach ache or a flu bug,  DRINK your probiotics! . . . Don’t get (or give) a flu shot! DRINK the (FERMENTED) PICKLE JUICE!!!”

Most pickles consumed in America, of course, aren’t fermented at all; the pickles are simply bathed in flavored vinegar. Are vinegar brines good for you, too? Recent studies show that vinegar both reduces appetite and, in people with diabetes or insulin resistance, lowers blood sugar after meals. Tradition credits vinegar with many more medicinal uses. According to Emily Thacker, author of The Vinegar Book, cider vinegar externally applied is said to preserve hair color, conquer the frizzies, end dandruff, soothe aching feet, cure fungal infections, and relieve welts, hives, and varicose veins. Administered by mouth, vinegar made from apples is supposed to cure a sore throat, relieve arthritis, settle the stomach, ease gas pains, cure hiccups, melt fat from the bones, and prevent food poisoning and ulcers, not to mention dementia. Drunk with water at dinnertime, cider vinegar is said to prevent nighttime leg cramps.

The belief in vinegar as a cure for muscle cramps has spread through the world of sports. Kevin C. Miller, a sports-science researcher at North Dakota State University, found that a quarter of athletic trainers have used “pickle juice” to treat muscle cramps. This “juice” needn’t come from pressed apples at all; Miller and his colleagues have tested the belief using the distilled-vinegar-based liquid from jars of Vlasic dill pickles. After the scientists electrically induced cramps in the big toes of exhausted athletes, they found that athletes fed pickle juice recovered 37 percent faster than those who drank de-ionized water, and 45 percent faster than those who drank nothing. Neither the salt nor the potassium metabisulfite in the pickle juice could explain this difference, the researchers concluded; the cure was too sudden. Miller postulated that something in the acidic liquid must have affected neural receptors in the throat or stomach, and those receptors must have sent signals that somehow disrupted the muscle cramps.

Or maybe the athletes could taste the different between pickle juice and water, and so the placebo effect came into play?

No matter—the faith in pickle juice in the gym bag has grown so strong that an enterprising Texan named Brandon Brooks  is marketing a pickle-brine-like liquid to compete with Gatorade. No cucumber or other vegetable has ever touched this mix of water, salt, vinegar of an unidentified sort, nutritional additives, preservatives, yellow dye, and “natural dill flavoring,” and Brooks admits that “nothing on the package tastes good.” But taste is not the point—after all, how many people actually like Gatorade? For pickier athletes, Brooks is developing a version of his product made with pomegranate extract; a little sugar should help the medicine go down.

Another entrepreneur from the Lone Star State, John Howard, says drinking pickle brine is an old Texan habit. He likes his pickle brine cold—ice-cold. Having begun freezing leftover pickle juice for customers at his roller rink, he now sells his frozen Pickle Pops  through the Internet, to Walmart, and even to public schools. Free of added sugar, Pickle Pops, his website brags, are not a “food of minimal nutritional value.”

Tomorrow I’ll continue this article, with the focus on pickle brine in bar drinks.

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