I’ve been keeping tabs on forkheartknife, the blog of Sierra Laumer, one of the proprietors of a soon-to-open Cincinnati restaurant that will also be known as forkheartknife. I love Sierra’s energetic style — and also her food — so I asked if I could share her post on making pickles. Be sure to visit her site for other great (and sometimes surprising) recipes — beet bi-products pizza comes to mind. — Mary T.

Today I made a load of pickles for a tapas and Italian bites dinner:
- Carrots in a spicy brine of chili oil, rice vinegar, sugar, salt, and spices
- Asparagus in a brine of Italian white wine vinegar, garlic, lemon zest, sugar, salt, and spices
- Beets in a pretty classic pickling juice
- Cukes pickled with fennel frond, dill, garlic, and jalapeno
- Red onion with my sherry vinegar
- And OKRA! in a pickling brine

I make a lazy pickle, or “quickle” (because I like making combo words, too). I don’t have a granny to teach me the fine nuances of canning, so I use a jar with a tight lid and keep everything in the fridge for safety.

To pickle something, I use the basic guidelines of 2 c. vinegar, 1 c. water, 1 c. sugar, and 1/4-1/2 c. salt. I play around with adding dried seasonings to the brine — you can adjust the final pickle profile by adding more mustard seed, dill seed, fennel seed, curry powder, cinnamon, paprika, ginger, cloves, star anise, etc. And sometimes I’ll add fresh herbs, jalapeno, garlic, or onion. Click for quick tips on making quick pickles.

For softer veggies like cukes, peppers, okra, onions, green beans, pack a jar with the vegetable, bring the pickling brine to a boil, then pour the brine over the veggies in the jar. (Make sure that the seasonings are equally distributed if you are filling more than one jar.) The lids go on while things are still really hot and that usually leaves me hearing the POP of the jars sealing. Things cool down and they go in the fridge for up to a month. I love them in the first week, usually still nice and crunchy and fresh tasting. Not that they get less crunchy, but it’s fun to taste how things change while they are hanging around longer.

For harder veggies like beets, carrots, turnips, rutabaga, radishes, thick asparagus, or tough green beans, blanch the veggies first in boiling, salty water and then pack into the can.

I have been having a fun time messing around with using different vinegar and spice combos. For a standard brine, white wine and cider vinegars work well. But you can kick up the flavor and change the whole profile by either substituting part of that cup of vinegar with sherry or balsamic or any other crazy, fun vinegar. With the carrot that I did this week, I used all rice wine vinegar.

I also try to use leftover pickle brine. When I made pickled caramelized onions, that brine was so good after having had onions sitting in it for a few days! I would have been sad to throw the good juice away, plus, it was full of that jerez sherry vinegar that I love (and ain’t cheap)! You can add the leftovers to new brine, but I also use the leftover jar juice for vinaigrettes, marinades, and other stuff that gets vinegar. — Sierra L.