Salt pickled chilis and garlic
I genuinely can’t believe I’ve become a person who makes my own pickles, but someone recommended Sandor Katz’ book Wild Fermentation to me in the comments of an article I wrote and now here we are. With a kitchen full of pickles.
My favourite home made pickle that I’ve eaten so far was the giant jar of radishes that was my first pickling experiment in lockdown. They were crunchy, umami as fuck and the brine turned this fantastic neon pink that I used to make salad dressing. It also taught me a valuable lesson, that you cannot straight up reuse the old brine to make more pickles. It seems like you should be able to because of the wealth of (good) bacteria growth the first round produces, but unfortunately, because the vegetables release liquid into the brine as they pickle, adding a second round changes the salt to liquid ratio enough that the wrong microbes can get a foothold instead. By the time that second round of radishes would have been ready to eat there was a layer of grey mould at the bottom of the jar so it all went in the bin.
Now I want pickled radishes. Oh well.
Today was not about radishes, today was about garlic and chilis. As well as being a delicious relish to add to things like rice or noodles these pickles will hopefully make cooking a little easier and faster on weekday nights, as I can just go for a spoon full of the preserved and pre-chopped ingredients instead of having to cut them up fresh every time.
Equipment
Some people prefer to use specialty self burping jars or pickling crocks, which are designed to keep the vegetables submerged while still allowing the gases produced during fermentation to escape, they can be expensive, and aren’t actually essential as long as you follow one of the methods for keeping your pickles fully submerged beneath the brine. You can even recycle old jam and relish jars for your pickling projects.
Other than that all you’ll need is a set of kitchen scales and a measuring jug for the brine, a cutting board and knife for prepping the vegetables and either a plastic freezer bag/sandwich bag, some cabbage leaves or a pickling weight.
Ingredients
Salt
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Water
150g mixed chilis
6 large bulbs of garlic
Sterilise your jars first. A lot of dishwashers apparently have a sterilise setting now but you can do it manually with boiling water. Please be careful doing this.
Dice the chilis and garlic as small as you want them.
Stir 10g of salt into 250 ml of boiling water until its dissolved. This makes a 2.5% brine, which isn’t especially strong as far as pickling brines go but is still enough to create the right environment for fermentation to occur. (You can use this brine to pickle pretty much any vegetable you want, you’re welcome EDIT: I’ve been informed I should have used a 3% on the garlic specifically as its one of the ingredients that needs a slightly higher salt percentage).
Pack the chilis and garlic into the jars. I did one with just chilis and another with garlic and a thin layer of chilis in the middle for flavour, but if you don’t like everything you eat to be spicy you can just leave the chilis out of the garlic pickle. Add the liquid, stirring it around to make sure all of the vegetables are properly covered in it and there are no air pockets or bubbles to throw off the fermentation process. I like to temporarily close the jars and shake them for a bit before letting them settle, just to make sure the brine has penetrated all the way through.
This is where it gets tricky if you’re not using a self burping pickle jar or crock. You want to make sure your pickles are fully submerged beneath the surface of the brine but if you’re using an ordinary jar for this you can’t just screw the lid on as the gasses will build up and be unable to escape, possibly even cracking the glass depending on how long you leave it sealed and how violently it ferments. Sandor Katz suggests the baggie full of brine method, where you take a food grade plastic bag, fill it full of the pickling solution, and lay it over the top of the vegetables so it weighs them down below the surface but the gasses can still push their way out. Filling the bag with brine instead of ordinary water is important because it means any leaks or tears will just release more brine into the jar instead of compromising the solution.
Another good method is using something like cabbage leaves and tucking them over the top of the vegetables and pouring more brine on top, though you have to be really careful to make sure you haven’t trapped any air pockets beneath the leaves if you do this. I like this method a lot because it doesn’t generate any plastic waste. However I accidentally left the cabbage leaves I’d set aside for this out of the fridge a few days ago so unfortunately they’d thoroughly withered by the time I wanted to use them today. Fortunately we have these little rice bowls and I noticed their bases fit perfectly through the neck of the jar, creating a sort of DIY self burping seal.
Now I’m going to leave them on the counter, out of direct sunlight, for a fortnight. This is roughly how long it takes them to be ready to eat, and while some people like to leave them out to ferment longer Katz recommends transferring them to the fridge at this point which will arrest the ferment. You should also make sure there aren’t any moulds or other growths appearing in or on top of the vegetables and dispose of the contents of the jar if any appear — though some people say that some of the moulds or yeast that can grow on pickles are harmless, and its safe to eat the pickles as long as you scoop them off, I don’t trust my ability to correctly identify them (its also why I won’t go mushroom picking) and prefer to be safe than sorry.
I can’t wait to taste them and see how they came out.
