As the harvest moon slowly swells, I’ve almost run out of jars for preserves: chutney, pickles, ferments and relishes. It’s been a good year for kitchen alchemy. The pantry shelves are laden. Apricot chutney. Plum chutney. Peach apple chutney. Pickled beets. Pickled cucumber. Pickled green chile. Sauerkraut - well that’s a ferment not a pickle. A brief oversimplified distinction: pickles are soaked/preserved in an acidic medium, ferments use bacteria to preserve and make sour flavors. Both are, to my mind, kitchen magic: alchemical processes which can be used to preserve, enhance flavor, aid digestion and/or improve nutritional value of foods.
For complicated reasons, I haven’t been much motivated to sell this year’s garlic harvest at the farmers market, so have been looking into ways to preserve some of it before it sprouts and to ensure I still have garlic to enhance my meals in the six months of the year after planting (October/November) and before harvest (May/June).
This led me down a fascinating rabbit hole and many hours researching Asian pickling methods, all of which seem to require massive amounts of patience. I settled on a Chinese recipe which puts whole bulbs in a soy sauce, sugar, salt and vinegar brine and recommends allowing two to eight months for maturation. I might just try these Chinese garlic pickles after two months. If they work, and I like them, next year I might prepare some earlier in the season so they can sit longer.
This particular recipe called for soaking the whole garlic bulbs 24 hours in a salt and vinegar solution, sun drying them for a day, before immersing in a soy sauce based brine. The hands on preparation part is thus fairly easy, albeit spread over time.
Technically the soy sauce I used is tamari because I could not source organic, msg free soy sauce in my town. A high quality tamari is a pantry staple in my house.
A Korean recipe for garlic Jangajji , (basically any vegetable preserved in soy sauce) on the other hand, requires that one break apart and peel the cloves, a hugely time consuming task, (library audiobooks to the rescue) before soaking for a month in vinegar and salt solution, to mellow the garlic pungency apparently. After this they will be drained and immersed another month or up to year, in a soy sauce, vinegar brine, similar to the Chinese garlic pickles recipe.
It is also height of chile harvest right now. The smell of roasting green chile currently perfumes all aspects of this enchanted life. Last week I acquired two gallons of this fresh roasted food of the gods. Like the fuel it is, Hatch green chile is sold by the gallon.
Green chile preparation is onerous and, because I like hot chile and because the excessively high summer temperatures have made this season’s chile harvest especially hot, this is the rare occasion when I wear nitrile gloves in the kitchen. They alleviate days of painful capsicum burned fingers. I’ve learned the hard way.
Roasting blisters the skin and imparts a lovely smoky flavor to a particular thick walled variety of chile which grows so well, under irrigation of course, in this area. My dentist operates out of the community health clinic in Hatch, the epicenter of world green chile production, so I am lucky enough to be able to acquire my chile very close to direct from source.
There are peripatetic special green chile roasters who travel throughout the southwestern USA with their rolling drums and gas tanks, preparing this magical food for us. One can often find them outside grocery stores.
My local farmers market invites chile roasters at height of season to roast on site the fresh harvested green chile which customers have purchased from small family farm vendors.
While I have been enjoying fresh roasted green chile in all manner of dishes recently, (above was a quinoa bowl with a Southwestern sheetpan roast of sweetcorn, garlic, onion, and sweet red pepper, all topped with chopped green chile) most of my recent two gallon score of green chile was scraped, deseeded, chopped and frozen.
For the first time this year I also pickled two jars in an improvised apple cider vinegar mustard seed brine. While it is young yet, pickled green chile is proving decidedly delicious. I might need to make more before the end of season.
Though the Asian garlic pickles might be a while still, today’s brunch made full use of this summer’s kitchen alchemy: pickled beets, pickled cucumber and pickled green chile, enjoyed with avocado and scratch made falafel smothered in a tahini yoghurt sauce.
There might not be any good vegan/vegetarian restaurants within a 150 mile radius of me, but I still manage to eat really well.
Recommended Reading:
Two recently read (listened to) memoirs got me thinking about Asian pickles:
Fresh Off The Boat: A Memoir by Chinese American chef Eddie Huang. 2013
Crying In H Mart by Korean American musician Michelle Zauner . 2021.
It was from the Michelle Zauner title that I learned about the special pickle fridge contemporary Koreans have to keep their pickles at the correct temperature. Traditionally, it seems, Asian pickles, such as my two garlic ventures above, would be buried in earthenware crocks in the ground to mature in the dark at an even temperature.
A whole fridge dedicated just to pickles. Now there’s an idea.
In the absence of a root cellar or hole in the ground, and earthenware crocks, my Asian alchemical attempts are in glass mason jars wrapped in layers of hand towels at the back of a pantry shelf. I like the glass as it means that I can periodically pull the towel wrappings aside to peek at the alchemy happening. It sure beats pulling carrots out of the ground to see if they have grown.
Because I’m serious about making (and eating) pickles and ferments, along with glass pickle weights, I have invested in non metal lids, screw bands and silicon pickling tops to fit standard wide mouth mason jars. This prevents my chutneys, pickles and ferments being contaminated by corrosion which can happen with the standard metal lids supplied with most mason jars in this country.
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