Pickles + Preserves – Writing With My Mouth Full

Pickled Okra with Smoked Paprika and Chiles

This was a big hit during the Fourth of July. Some people asked me how the okras remained crunchy even after being pickled for two weeks. My secret is skipping the blanching part of most pickling recipes. After washing the okras thoroughly, I pat them dry with paper towels and put them in a jar. (I use chopsticks to keep them vertical.) They soften enough to eat raw after being in brine for a few days, but not too soft that there’s no more oomph left to them. For those who think okras are too slimy, I minimize that by keeping the tops intact. When the pickles are ready, the stems are even tender enough to eat.

Ingredients:
1 pound small okra, thoroughly washed, pat dry
2 cups white vinegar
2 tbsps sugar
2 tbsps salt
2 tbsps smoked paprika powder
1 tsp whole mustard seed
1 tsp whole white pepper corns
1 tsp crushed chiles
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 cloves of garlic, minced

1. In pickling jars, stuff the okra standing up.
2. In a small non-reactive pot, bring the rest of the ingredients to a boil for a minute or until the salt is completely dissolved. Pour this mixture into the jar and add enough water to cover the tops of the okra. Use a small tea cup to weigh the okra down. Secure the lid and allow the jar to come to room temperature. Store in fridge.

Sichuan Dry-Fried String Beans

I picked up a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty from the library last week. I skimmed through it before I checked it out because I wanted to see if the recipes were easy to do at home. I’m obsessed with this dry-fried string beans dish I always order when I’m eating at Grand Sichuan, so I made sure there was a similar string beans entry caled rou mo jiang dou. My mouth watered while reading the recipe and I knew I just had to do it pronto.

Before heading out to Chicago earlier this week, I pickled the string beans. Emptying them out when I was ready to make a Friday lunch, I couldn’t believe how fragrant it had gotten. The star anise and the ginger together gave the beans a most familiar smell: I knew I was on the right track.

Thank you to Fuschia Dunlop’s time in Chengdu! The recipes gave me an understanding of how much history came with each, but she’s deciphered them to make it easy to replicate at home.

Ingredients:
1 bunch of long green beans
1/4 lb ground pork
1/2 tsp rice wine
1/2 tsp light soy sauce
3 dried Thai chiles, snipped in half and some of the seeds discarded
1/2 tsp whole Sichuan peppercorns
salt
peanut oil for cooking

For the pickling solution:
4 dried Thai chiles
1/2 tsp whole Sichuan peppercorns
2 tsps rice wine
1 star anise
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 large finger of ginger, peeled, chopped in smaller pieces
1 cinnamon stick
salt

1. Pickle the string beans up to 3 days in advance. Wash the beans thoroughly and store in a pickling jar large enough to hold all the long beans. Meanwhile, boil about 3 cups of water with some salt until it dissolves. Add the rest of the ingredients and let simmer for 5 minutes, or until water has reduced to more or less 2 cups. Set aside and let cool. When pickling solution is cool enough, separate the solid ingredients and stuff them in the jar with the beans. Pour in pickling liquid to fill the jar; there should be enough water to submerge all of the beans. Close tightly and store in the fridge until ready to cook.
2. At time of cooking, mix ground pork with rice wine, soy sauce and salt in a large glass bowl. Set aside.
3. Remove beans from pickling solution and chop into small pieces to complement the small grains of the ground pork. You can pick the brown tips and throw those away.
4. Using a wok or a large frying pan, heat some peanut oil until almost smoking. Add the pork and stir-fry until dry and crispy. Transfer back to the same bowl.
5. Add a fresh coat of peanut oil to the pan and heat. Add chiles and peppercorns and stir-fry until fragrant. Be careful not to let them burn. Add the beans and stir-fry for 1 minute. Add the pork and stir-fry for another minute. Serve with a steaming bowl of white rice.

Tomato Preserve

I couldn’t ignore the beautiful photograph that accompanied Amanda Hesser’s recreation of a 1948 tomato preserve recipe in The New York Times Magazine last month. I cut the recipe short and marinated the tomatoes in sugar for only a few hours instead of overnight. I didn’t seed the tomatoes either, nor did I remove the lemon slices when I stored the finished product in a glass jar. My version still came out nice enough to spread in toasted baguettes and crackers.

Ingredients:
8 plum tomatoes
3/4 cup sugar
3 cloves
1 stick cinnamon
a small knob of ginger, peeled, sliced
1/4 of a lemon, thinly sliced, seeded

1. Boil some water in a small pot. Skin tomatoes by cutting a shallow X in their rounded end. Add tomatoes in the boiling water for 30 seconds. Remove the tomatoes using a slotted spoon and let cool. When cool enough to handle, peel off tomato skins.
2. Layer the tomatoes and sugar in a small Dutch oven. Cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours.
3. When ready to cook, put all the spices in a cheesecloth and add to the tomatoes along with the sliced lemon. Place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Cook, stirring and gently crushing often, until the tomatoes have become slightly translucent and the syrup is thick and begins to gel. Don’t boil the syrup, or the tomatoes will fall apart.
4. Remove the spice bag. Remove Dutch oven from heat and let tomato preserve cool before transferring to a resealable glass jar.

Related post/s:
Tomatillos are related to tomatoes

Watermelon Rind Pickles

Watermelon rind pickles are apparently a Southern thing. But I first had them at Fatty Crab, a Zak Pelaccio restaurant here in New York City devoted to Southeast Asian cuisine. I’ve been wanting to recreate their dish served with crispy pork belly at home, and the opportunity finally came when Cameron and I started planning our first Supper with Strangers.

Supper with Strangers is an urban supper club devoted to bringing together New York City’s food-loving populace. We think it’s a chance to celebrate the season’s flavors, meet others with equally good taste, and have them enjoy a fantastic, home-cooked meal with great people. We both love to cook and entertain, so we figured, why not create our very own supper club and meet new people in the process?

While we planned the first menu in a span of almost three weeksâ€”that’s why the updates on this blog have been intermittentâ€”we wanted to feature cool and refreshing dishes using summer ingredients. One watermelon appetizer idea brought us to featuring watermelon as the main ingredient for all our dishes, a la Iron Chef. After several tastings, we came up with a winning menu and consulted with Pour Wines for wine and beer pairings.

Welcome cocktail: Watermelon-Shiso Mojito

Amuse-bouche: Kebab of Watermelon, Bresaola, and Caper Berry
Vegetarian alternate: sheep’s milk cheese instead of bresaola

Appetizer: Chilled Thai-Spiced Watermelon Soup with Crab
Vegetarian alternate: sans the crab
Paired with: Francois Pinon Vouvray Tendre Cuvee Tradition, 2006, Loire Valley

Main dish: Fried Pork Belly with Pickled Watermelon Rinds
Vegetarian alternate: Roasted Golden Beet with Shiitake Mushrooms and Pickled Watermelon Rinds
Paired with: Ommegang Hennepin Farmhouse Saison Ale, Cooperstown, NY

Salad: Watermelon and Green Papaya Salad with Tequila Vinaigrette
Paired with: Salneval AlbariÃ±o, 2007, Galicia, Spain

Dessert: Watermelon Cream Sorbet with Pirouettes
Served with coffee or mint tea

Ingredients:
watermelon rind, 4 quarts of 1-inch chunks (see directions for preparation)
2 cups white vinegar
4 cups white sugar
1 tbsp whole cloves
5 cinnamon sticks
2 star anise
1 tbsp juniper berries
a pinch of mustard seeds
2 cups of water

1. Slice open the watermelon your usual way. Separate the red flesh from the rind. (Eat the red flesh later!) Peel the green skin off the rinds. Chop rinds in smaller chunks.
2. Make the brine. In a large pot, combine all the ingredients except rind and cook over medium fire until sugar dissolves. Remove pot from heat and let completely cool.
3. Transfer watermelon rind chunks in a pickling jar. Pour in brine until all of the rinds are submerged. I put a small and heavy tea cup to weigh the rinds down inside the pickling jar. Store in the refrigerator for at least 2 weeks.

Pickled Ramps

In a week’s time, New York City has gone from spring to summer. Temperature was up 76 last week and I wore shorts to work. Good thing the produce at the farmers’ market was still in spring mode because I couldn’t have celebrated the warm weather without having my first ramps of the season. I got my early batch from Whole Foods for $19.99 a pound. F that! A bigger bunch in Union Square was $2.50 each when I stopped by the next morning. Because I was able to afford a few bunches, I decided to pickle them.

Make sure you wash and clean the ramps thoroughly. From the farmers’ market, the roots were intact. I cut them off and washed them with the water running; the onion skin from the stalks easily came off. I cut off and only left about an inch of the greens. I set the leaves aside for another recipe. Shichimi togarashi is a Japanese spice mix used to flavor soups and noodle dishes. You can buy a small bottle from Sunrise Mart if you’re in Manhattan, or else make your own.

Ingredients:
4 bunches of ramps
2 cups rice-wine vinegar
1 cup white sugar
salt

For the shichimi togarashi:
1 tsp red chili flakes
1 tsp sesame seeds
3 curls of orange peel
a very small knob of ginger, peeled, crushed
1 sheet of nori

1. Bring all the ingredients, except the ramps, to a full boil in 3 cups of water until sugar dissolves.
2. In a pickling jar, place cleaned ramps and pour in the pickling juice. Using a small tea cup as weight, make sure that the ramps are completely submerged. Let cool to room temperature.
3. Seal jar and store in the refrigerator for about 5 days.