After stirring up the hornet’s nest with yesterday’s post, we wasted no time! Radish season is decidedly over here, so it was time to put up the bulk of our crop!
Radish are a cool season veggie that are exceptionally heat averse. Once the heat starts rolling in, they quickly bolt and the radish flesh starts to get a bit woody and a lot less tasty. If you missed our first radish run, you can also do a late season radish harvest. Typically, you want to plant them in early to mid August, with the intention of harvesting sometime after first frost. They are quite cold tolerant, so feel free to let them ride through a few frosts.
In years past, you’ve seen us do a lot of radish ferments. That’s not what this is. This year, we decided to pickle our radish harvest. We try to change things up here and there between seasons, just so things don’t get too repetitive.
Quick pickling is a very versatile way of temporarily preserving food. The gist of it is that you’re using acid (typically vinegar) to bring the pH down so far that the food is rendered safe for short term storage. While quick pickling is not great for long term preservation, you can usually get two to four weeks of storage if your pickles are kept in the fridge. The quick pickling technique is useful beyond just cucumbers and actual pickles, as you can see here.
Quick pickles usually balance some degree of sweetness (typically from cane sugar) and also an herbal component (commonly from spices) to achieve their overall flavor profile. While there are known “safe” ratios of these various components, there is a fair bit of flexibility to these kinds of pickles. They can be very sweet forward, very vinegar forward or somewhat balanced. We usually recommend following known recipes until you fully understand what’s at play. But, overall, there is a much higher safety factor in pickling compared to fermentation.
If you’re a bit apprehensive about diving into canning practices, pickling is an excellent intermediate step within the preservation world. There’s no actual “canning” involved, it’s just a matter of filling a jar with your food and covering it with your pickling liquid. If you can follow a basic recipe, you can do it. There’s a ton of recipes out there that can get you started. And like we said, there’s a much higher degree of safety since you’re not aiming for long term preservation.
Home made pickles like this go great with charcuterie boards or even as a simple side dish that’s perfect for those summer nights. You can also put them on sandwiches or salads, tacos, burgers, on a piece of meat or infuse them into other foods where pickles would be a good fit. We usually just eat them plain ourselves, since they are addictively tasty. We find pickling radishes brings forward the original zest a lot better than fermentation does.
We are happy to finally be at the point of putting up food, even if it’s just for a few weeks! We’ve got a lot more pickles coming and of course we’ll try to bring you along!
