Get yourself in a (delicious) pickle.

Forget water baths and vacuum sealing, try THIS instead.

Author

Kristina Todini, RDN
August 15, 2023

You’ve got yourself in a (delicious) pickle.

It’s that time of year, when everything is popping off in the garden and it’s all you do find enough ways to eat up the tomatoes, zucchini, and carrots.

If you’re anything like me, and your countertop is overflowing with fresh vegetables that NEED to get eaten up – and your neighbors are tired of taking the extras off your hands – then it’s the perfect time to start preserving.

But the thought of worrying about water baths temperatures, squeaky clean mason jars, and vacuum sealing makes your palms sweat, I have an alternative for you…

Quick pickling!

Quick pickling, sometimes referred to as refrigerator pickling, is a way to preserve vegetables (and fruit!) by soaking them in a salted brine and storing them in the refrigerator.

And while the storage time is significantly less than the years of shelf life from traditional pickling, you can keep quick pickled produce in the fridge for up to a month to extend the life of foods.

I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite refrigerator pickling recipes, as well as my go-to quick pickling brine, to get you started on the right foot. 👇

START HERE: Refrigerator Pickling Brine for Vegetables

This is my go-to quick pickling brine for any type of vegetable, with herb and spice flavoring options you can customize for each pickle batch.

Then try quick pickled red onions

Onions are a great first pickling experiment, as they’re super versatile and hard to mess up.

Then get creative with green beans

When you want to get more creative, try green beans and add peppers and garlice.

Then go expert level with zucchini

Once you’ve got pickling down to a science, get creative with pickled zucchini ribbons.

DID YOU KNOW? 🧐

Old-time picklers couldn’t accurately measure the salt needed for making pickle brines, since the density of commercially bought salt varied from year to year. To get around this potential problem—too little or too much salt can cause pickles to spoil—many recipes recommended using "enough salt to float an egg" in the brine. While this method yielded fermented pickles that could keep all winter, they were too salty to be eaten. Picklers had to soak the pickles in water for days to make them edible. (source)

LOVELY LINKS 🔗

  • LISTEN TO IT: Stanford plant-based researcher Dr. Christopher Gardner is doing the podcast rounds, and this week he’s on the Rich Roll podcast talking about the challenges of conducting nutrition studies and why the public is confused by nutrition science. (Rich Roll)

  • TRY IT: 10 new vegan food products on the market (I’m happy about the Ripple pea milk for kids, it’s the dairy-free milk I recommend to parents). (VegNews)

  • LEARN IT: 10 important food systems issues at the center of the upcoming Farm Bill (Civil Eats)

❝

Good ideas, like good pickles, are crisp, enduring, and devilishly hard to make.

Rushworth Kidder

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