Pickle & Preserve

Gina: We’ve taken a few memorable family vacations to the Gulf Coast of Florida, which is a great place to indulge our passion for the beach and fresh shrimp. These pickled shrimp are perfect for entertaining, because they are actually best made a day in advance. They’re delicious on their own, or eaten with buttered slices of French bread.

There is not much to peel in celery, just the strings that run along the ribs that can be annoying to eat. To remove them, I take a peeler and lightly run it along the back of the celery rib. Another way to remove them is with a paring knife. When you are trimming the base or the top of the stalk, don’t just chop away, but gently hold the stalk in your hands and cut from the inside of the stalk to the outside without cutting all the way through. Just before finishing the cut, pull the knife toward you and the strings should peel off down the length of the stalk.

If you like, trim the stems of the mushrooms even with the caps—they will look neater that way. Save the stems for vegetable stock or chop them for a vegetable soup. The mushrooms keep for a few days in the refrigerator. If you want to keep them longer, top them off with enough oil and vinegar to cover them completely. The oil will float to the top and seal out air. They’ll keep a couple of weeks like this.

Pickled chorizo is a harmonious blend of acid and fat that makes something more than the sum of its parts. The sweetness of the vinegars helps balance the heady spice blend of Spanish chorizo. It’s wonderful folded into a ragout of chickpeas or giant lima beans. Pickled chorizo is an intriguing note with marinated raw seafood. It’s delicious as an ingredient in soups and stews, softening the texture of the chorizo and permeating the liquid with its flavor. The resulting vinegar is a wonderful ingredient on its own, for salads and sauces, where that meaty, spicy note helps bring everything else into focus.

These pickled limes use Vadouvan spice blend, sometimes labeled French curry, a combination of Indian spices often including curry leaves, fenugreek, mustard seeds, coriander, shallots, and garlic. The exact blend depends on who makes it. It is aromatic and gives a haunting depth of flavor to the finished pickles. They are wonderful with fish, pork, and roasted vegetables and add a subtle tang to sauces, rice pilafs, or creamy grits. Lime pickles can be finely chopped into a condiment, used whole in braises, or thinly sliced and gently fried. Once you taste them, a world of possibilities opens up before you.

When we think of kimchi we tend to picture the classic kind found in Asian supermarkets, which is made primarily with Napa cabbage stained red from the chili powder and pungent with garlic. Interestingly, although that is indisputably the most popular variation, kimchi can be made with a wide array of vegetables and spices, with regional variations that affect the ingredients used and levels of heat and spice. Here we’ve used red cabbage for two reasons. The first is because we like its sweet flavor and slightly sturdy texture. The second, more practical, reason is that these fermented pickles are generally deemed ready when enough lactic acid is produced to change the pH from 6.5 to approximately 3.5. Red cabbage juice changes color at this pH and becomes a bright reddish-purple, giving you a visual cue when fermentation is complete. Kimchi is a surprisingly good condiment for grilled hot dogs. It is a great way to doctor up packaged ramen at home. In place of coleslaw on a sandwich, it can add an unexpected kick to anything from corned beef on rye to pulled pork on soft white bread. Its heat and tang are wonderful for cutting through rich ingredients, and as a substitute for sauerkraut in choucroute, it is utterly delicious.

Pickled watermelon rind is a classic summer condiment when the melons are in abundance. Here we’ve added our twist by using Japanese yuzu juice and rice wine vinegar to give the pickles a kick.

You can serve this with thick cream or mascarpone, or with vanilla ice cream. For the preserve to last a long time, it needs the same weight of sugar as of figs. If you will be eating it within 2 weeks you can make it much less sweet, but keep it in the refrigerator.

A delicacy which should be attempted whenever green walnuts are available.

This pickle turns a deep purple with the juice from the red cabbage. You can also use white cabbage and color the pickle with a few slices of raw or cooked beet.