In Search Of...

[tephra]

Good, not sweet refrigerator pickle recipes.

Actually what I'd really like is something that spells out the minimum required amount of vinegar and salt (in proportions) in the brine. I know someone, somewhere, has studied that. The USDA probably has, but damned if I can find it the information (without wading through the very, very long and tedious USDA documents anyway).

I want to make a decent amount of pickled cauliflower but the recipes I'm finding fall into three categories: sweet (YUCK!), hot (I mean, really hot, the amount of habaneros one recipe called for terrified me), or weird (cooking my cauliflower in oil flavored with toasted cumin, coriander, and turmeric before pickling for instance, or including Coke in the brine.) None of those is what I want. I want a nice, not too sour but not at all sweet, refrigerator cauliflower pickle, dilled is good but not required.

This is the closest so far, though I wasn't really thinking of making 4 quarts of it (unless it turned out really, really good). I think I'd just leave out the dried chillies and hope for the best. The fact that it uses white wine vinegar (low acid, yay!) and no sugar is good but I have to wonder if that's enough vinegar.

Comments

[morganalilith.livejournal.com]

i've never made refridgerator pickles, but have canned pickles a few times. unfortunately my grandmother's dill pickle recipe doesn't come out as good when i make it. i helped her can pickles a bazillion times, and i can't figure out what i'm doing differently.... she suggested maybe it was the water, since i lived in an area that had pretty icky water at that time...

anyways, the only difference between her regular dills and her HOT mix was that the hot mix had a hot pepper or two in each jar. it was the same brine and the same spices. and it basically doesn't matter what sorts of veggies go in the jar.... the brine is acidic enough to preserve all of them. (i suppose that would depend on the specific recipe, but i've no idea what the lowest safe proportions of acid, salt and water would be). but we used cauliflower, green beans, carrots, pearl onions, cukes, and probably other things in the hot mix.

i'd say that if you find a recipe that looks promising but contains peppers, just leave out the peppers. and let me know how it goes. i'd be interested in trying a fridge pickle recipe if you find one that's awesome. i'm not interested in sweet pickles either. they're evil, lol.

[tephra]

It was probably the water. Try making a batch with distilled water? From my brief foray into pickle research they mentioned avoiding the use of hard water when making pickles. Though growing up with hard water and making some pretty nice pickles with mom when I was a kid I can't say that hard water always makes a bad pickle. :)

Sounds like I get to experiment when that one likely recipe, and dig around to see if I can find some others. Most of my cookbooks that have pickled recipes are all canned, which I could do, but with the amount of work I'd have to make a fairly large batch to feel productive about it. And then where would I store it all?

Sweet pickles are very, very evil. XP I made a batch of "firecracker" pickles (baby carrot pickles) and while I reduced the hot spices I didn't really think about the sugar in the recipe. They're sweet like candy. Hot carrot candy. GROSS!

hafoc doesn't like sweet pickles either so those are living in the back of the fridge. I need to pitch them out in the woods.

My ideal veggie blend will involve cauliflower and carrots, and maybe whole garlic and pearl onions. I wonder how snow peas pickle....