What's your favorite pickle recipe?

Two favorites:

Very quick and easy pickled radishes. Slice them thinly, put them in a container with some vinegar (preferably apple cider vinegar), and put them in the fridge over night. They are great on salads.

I also like pickled beets. Slice and boil until fork tender. Make a brine that is 50% beet juice and 50% vinegar. Add salt (sorry, don’t have the measurements at hand), a dash of sugar, and a few pepper corns to the brine. Fill a container with your beets and pour the brine over the top. Cool, cover and stick in the fridge.

Pickled peppers are easy to do, especially since you can mix them and the brine will soak up the oils (which carry the spice) and disperse them evenly through the batch. The last time I did these, I sliced three red bell peppers, a yellow wax pepper (my nemesis), a couple of red chile peppers, a jalapeno, and two habaneros. My brine was white vinegar, some salt, a bit of water, and olive oil (seals the top from mold if the seal should break) with two garlic cloves cut in half, and some wild rosemary.
They came out pleasantly spicy! When I had eaten most of the jar, I wanted to continue using the brine, so I cut up some tomatoes and put them in to soak for an evening. The next day I had the brine soaked tomatoes, some peppers, cheese and avacado on toast. Mmmm.

Now, if you’re meaning “real” pickles, with cucumbers, I’m not experienced enough to tell you. You might want to look on-line. A Google search ought to clue you in…

I was just reminded of the old Extension Service my parents and your parents, and everyone else’ parents used. If you want to know anything at all, my mother tells me, then call or find them on-line if you can. The service will tell you anything from pie-making, to A-Frame support building, to leather tanning… the list is much grander than I can tell. The way I’ve been told, it’s a reference library, with librarians who can tell you the content without you having to look further, yourself.

1) Buy a jar of pickles.
2) Eat them with cheese, or a nice pate, and biscuits.

The main ingredient in my favorite recipe for pickle bread is dill dough. ;-p

Curried Armenian cucumbers (just add curry powder to any pickle recipe) and garm masala beets.

Oh… my favorite thing to pickle? That’s not an easy choice. I would say one of my favorites I’ve done is pickled artichoke hearts, though I had overcooked them so that they kind of fell apart during their cure. Still, they were delicious!

Another hobby of mine is curing olives! I grew up on the Central Coast of California where the climate is regarded as Mediterranean by many. Lots of their plants will grow well there, including black olives! The Conquistadores followed by the Jesuits and Catholic missionaries would plant them at their missions along the El Camino Real, where many of them stand to this day.

While attending college in San Luis Obispo, I would gather each fall several bins of ripe black and underripe green olives to cure. I would soak them in a rock salt brine and water for about three weeks, changing out the water as soon as it turned dark from the olives’ tannins. I made sure to keep enough rock salt in with the brine that there would be remaining crystals at the bottom (the water couldn’t dissolve it all) so that the solution would never be too neutral (inviting mold).

After the three weeks I would jar up the olives in fresh brine (no extra salt) and add vinegar, garlic, peppercorns, and spices to taste. I would top them off each with about half an ounce of olive oil (again to preserve in case of a bad seal). I just went through the last of 10 mason quart jars I made in fall of 2008. It helped that I had made enough to sate my family’s desires for olives in previous years so that I could safely store a couple jars of ‘08 for a while. It was actually an oversight on my part that I had allowed them to keep so long, since I would have nom’d them in an instant at any time after the rest had gone. (So much for preventative measures, eh?)

Pickled @Blondesjon -

2 shots Jaeger
2 Shots Evan Williams
1 Shot Crown Royal (you really need to respect this stuff)
12–15 Cheap to Moderately Priced Beers

Apply liberally and ENJOY!

Home pickled tiny pear and cherry tomatoes- Green, Red, Orange or whatever. Once they’ve been soaking in the home brine for a few weeks then they are ambrosia!

I love kimchi (Korean pickled cabbage) and there are many different ways of making it. I have yet to try this recipe for kimchi, but I like it because it is suitable for vegetarians, some kimchi has fish in it.

And I just couldn’t eat Mexican food without spicy pickled carrots and jalapenos. Here’s a recipe for them.

And pickled garlic is really yummy.

And here’s 3 recipes for nifty pickled eggs Yum!

Note to self: Do not stand downwind of anybody who consumes all of the items on this post in the same sitting. Toot Toot!