Today was one of those days.
Some exquisitely pricey and uncomfortable dentistry was involved.
So was the death of one half of my ten year old pair of Yaktrax and my subsequent slipping and falling on Baltimore’s indifferently maintained sidewalks.
There was also the discovery that some of Baltimore’s Finest — by which I mean the large and industrious rats for which the town is justly infamous — had chewed a hole through the bottom of my hard plastic trash can, a discovery made by dint of removing the lid from what I thought was a sturdily lidded garbage can and having two sleek, well-fed, sturdy-looking rats look up at me as if I were the problem.
So I decided to make some Hunanese pickled cabbage. Pickles and fermented foods, of whatever sort, give you something to look forward to. There’s no instant gratification really, save the mild pleasures of doing a little work with your hands and the smells and textures of the food with which you’re working. But putting together a batch of pickles or sauerkraut or what-have-you does provide one with the often underestimated pleasure of anticipation. Anticipation is a cousin to hope, which is also relevant given the vagaries of pickling with naturally-occurring microbes. And both are a fine counterbalance to a draining, dispiriting day.
I base my Hunanese pickled cabbage on the recipe Fuchsia Dunlop gives in Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, but I have my own preferences about seasonings and methodology that derive from my experience eating, and fermenting, other things. (If you’re new to this sort of thing you may prefer to try her recipe over attempting my rather hand-wavy method.)
setup: crock, cabbage, vodka, seasonings, and salt
The mise-en-place is pretty simple. Clockwise from the upper right are the pickling crock, the drop-lid to the pickling crock, some cheesecloth for containing the spices, pickled jalapenos, ginger, spices, garlic, salt, vodka, and cabbage. I suppose the water-filtering pitcher you can just see in the right corner can represent the water that goes into the brine.
The crock is important, though it must be said you don’t have to have a purpose-built crock like I do (I commissioned mine from Wild Yam Pottery up the street). You could use a big bowl and a plate, or a clean bucket and a Frisbee and some rocks for that matter, but after a while I decided a purpose-built vessel was a good idea. The biggest reason I commissioned one is so that I would have a suitable vessel of a suitable size for small-batch fermenting — it holds about three gallons — with a droplid that weighed enough to do what a droplid is supposed to do.
fermenting crock and droplid
You see how the lid looks like it’s just barely the right size for the crock? Well, actually, it fits inside the crock. Weighing in at about two pounds, the drop lid is heavy enough to keep whatever I’m fermenting weighted down beneath the level of the brine. This keeps aerobic bacteria from colonizing the food and causing rot. So long as the food is totally submerged, it will ferment but generally not rot. (Occasionally this does not hold true. But mostly it does.) Pretty cool, huh?
the droplid at the bottom of the crock
To make Hunanese pickled cabbage, you need a cabbage. This one I picked up at the Asian supermarket because they were on sale, but you could use any kind of cabbage you like: green, red, savoy, flat head, cone head. You could also use bok choy, or mustard greens. Or you could pickle things by this method that weren’t cabbages or cabbage-relations at all, if you liked… carrots, beets, kohlrabi, turnips, etc. I stuck with cabbage because I have Big Plans for a mess of pickled cabbage later on: one of my favorite simple homey stir-fries, which I will tell you about in a week or two, uses pickled cabbage as its primary vegetable. You also need some ginger, some garlic, and…
spice mixture for hunanese pickled cabbage
Spices. In the spice bowl, I put some star anise, some fennel seed, some green cardamom, some cinnamon bark, some whole coriander, and plenty of Sichuan pepper. The “Hunanese” part suggests chiles as well as Sichuan pepper, so there are some dried Tientsin chiles in there, too. For extra kick of a different sort, I also like to add some pickled jalapeno peppers, an element I borrowed directly from Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe. (Pickling them all over again doesn’t do them any harm, you can eat them later along with the cabbage.)
Because you don’t want to have to pick out those tiny little bits of spice from the finished pickle, nor do you want to bite down on them while you eat, tie the dry spices up in a piece of cheesecloth. This acts like a big teabag, letting flavors permeate the brine and the pickled vegetables without letting the spices go all over everywhere.
pickling spices tied into a piece of cheesecloth
Once this has been assembled, and you’ve prepped your ginger and garlic as you desire (I like to peel my ginger and chunk it up, some folks don’t bother peeling it but slice it into coins, my only caveat would be not to slice it too small so you can find it later on), chop up your cabbage into bite-sized pieces. How big “bite-sized” might be is completely up to you.
Pack the cabbage into your crock, and tuck the spice bundle in on top. Festoon with ginger and garlic and pickled peppers, then make your brine. For this recipe, I use a brine that is 3/4 cup coarse sea salt to 16 cups water, plus 1 cup vodka — the addition of spirits to pickling brine is a Chinese thing, and I like the way it tastes, but you can leave it out if you don’t like it or don’t have it.
the crock is packed, the brine is ready
As you can see, the crock is awfully full here. I normally don’t pack it quite so full, but such was the size of the cabbage. It’s not a big problem since the brine will wilt the cabbage considerably by tomorrow morning (and further from there), so the crock will end up less full than it began. Filling a crock all the way to the brim does make it tricky to move, though, so unless you’re going to leave your crock more or less where you filled it, I don’t recommend filling your crock quite so full as I have here.
Add your brine until your vegetables are covered, and place your drop lid on the vegetables so that all the solids are submerged.
just barely covered!
It’s a little hard to tell from this photo, but the droplid is just barely covered with brine, by perhaps a quarter of an inch. This will, due to the wilting action of the salt on the vegetables I mentioned above, probably increase to two or three inches of brine above the droplid by tomorrow morning.
This is the point where you carefully maneuver your crock into whatever out-of-the-way, relatively cool spot you have chosen as pickle parking… and leave it be. Check it each day to make sure all is as it should be, thoroughly submerged and all that good stuff, and skim off any scum that forms. (You can also drape a clean dishtowel over the top of the crock to keep dust out if you like. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.) But otherwise, the pickling process is now between the veggies and the local airborne bacteria, and there’s not much to be done except clean up after yourself, and anticipate the goodies to come.
About which there will be more when there is more to say.
