The elderberry bushes I planted last year are now quite large and blooming profusely, so I decided it would be fun to try  my hand at  making my own elderflower liqueur.  I’m a big fan of St. Germain liqueur, which has a great deal of elderflower in it (along with various fruits), and have enjoyed elderflower cordial, the nonalcoholic infused sugar syrup, many times.  In the past I have had decent success at making various other types of infused liqueurs and brandied fruits– Meyer lemon limoncello, gingerbread rum, lemon-ginger cordial, brandied cherries and plums and peaches–so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

First, pick your elderflowers.  You want the heads that are fully bloomed, but that are not yet yellowed or withered-looking, since as they wilt they can take on an alarming aroma of cat piss.  You’ll want to carefully examine them and remove any tiny insects, of which there will be more than you expect because of course you aren’t going to use the blossoms from elderberry plants that have been sprayed with icky things like pesticides, right?  Right.  So you’ll be debugging, in the literal sense.  Be patient, since either you can get them out now or you can drink a bug-infused liqueur later.

Your Very Good Dog will help you be patient.  He likes to sunbathe while his monkeys do the work.

Then you strip off the blossoms, with as little of the green stems as possible, and shove them into sterilized jars.  Pack the jars nice and full, since you want plenty of plant matter available to infuse its oils into the alcohol you’ll add in a minute or two.

Fill the jars with clear, plain alcohol.  I did two jars, and filled one with grain alcohol and the other with cachaca, the Brazilian sugarcane liquor, to see which I like better.  I’ve made some very nice fruit infusions with cachaca in the past, so it’ll be interesting to see how it works.  Grain alcohol, of course, brings no flavor of its own to the party, and is very high proof, so it affects botanical ingredients somewhat differently and you end up with a different flavor at the end.

I also added a small quantity, about 1/4 teaspoon, of citric acid to each half-pint jar.  I’ve found in the past that the acid helps retain whatever color gets infused, and also helps balance the flavor.  You don’t need much.

Put lids on your jars.  Put them in a cool, dark place to infuse.

And now we wait.  I’ll give these a few weeks to infuse, then strain the solids out and see what we’ve got.  After that, I’ll sweeten the infusion with simple syrup, or possibly do a second shorter infusion with some other, complementary ingredients — lemon zest, perhaps, or some kind of fruit.  We shall see!

                          

This is a simple process, but a little fiddly.  Because you are dealing with fruits that produce quite a bit of their own pectin, you don’t add any: the marmalade has only three ingredients, fruit, water, and sugar.  I typically make preserves like these only with organic fruits, because when fruits are sprayed it tends to stay in the peels/rinds, and marmalade is all about those.  Let your conscience be your guide.

I make citrus marmalades by volume — some confiture is done by weight, you don’t want to mix them up, because if you are measuring some ingredients by volume and weighing the others it may be enough to banjax your results.

Meyer lemon marmalade is a 1:1:1 marmalade by volume.  6 cups lemon, 6 cups water, 6 cups sugar.

To prepare the lemons, take well-scrubbed Meyer lemons.  Halve them from pole to pole, then slice each half into quarters, also from pole to pole.  Slice out the inner core of membrane and set it aside in a bowl.  Also remove and reserve all the seeds, and if there are any places where the membrane between sections is right at the edge of a wedge of fruit, peel that away and reserve it as well.  Slice the fruit wedges very thinly, including the peels.  You will do this until you have 6 cups of seeded, somewhat de-membraned, finely sliced lemon.

Place the sliced lemons into a large, heavy, non-reactive pot.  Pour in 6 cups cold water.

Put all the reserved membrane, seeds, and such into a scrap of cheesecloth, twist it into a pouch, and tie it shut with some kitchen twine.  Leave a long end on the twine so you can tie it to the handle of the pot you have your lemons and water in.  Toss the bundle into the pot — this is your pectin bag, because all the things inside it produce lots of lovely pectin that will make your marmalade gel.

Bring the pot to a boil, then simmer until the lemon is tender when you taste a piece.  Remove the pectin bag and set it aside to cool.

While the pectin bag is cooling, you can do the following:

• Put a few (4-5) saucers or sauce dishes or small plates in your freezer to get cold.
• Sterilize your canning jars, and prepare the lids and bands.
• Get your hot water bath canner full and warmed up so you can bring it to a boil quickly when needed.
• Get out your candy thermometer.

When the pectin bag is cool enough to handle, knead and squeeze it out over the pot, so that you squeeze out as much of the thick, gloopy, lubricious pectiny goodness as possible.  (Discard the pectin bag after you’ve gotten what you came for.)  Stir the pectin into the fruit and water and bring the fruit back to a low boil.

Add the sugar and stir until it is dissolved.  Bring the mixture to a boil and cook it at a steady boil, stirring occasionally and scraping down the sides of the pot when needed, until it reaches about 218F (about 103C).  Test by getting one of your cold plates from the freezer and placing about 1/4 teaspoon — just a small blop — of the boiling preserves on the plate.  Give it a few seconds and tilt the plate.  If it’s still runny, it isn’t ready yet.

Most of the time, marmalade will be ready between 220F (104.4 C) and 223F (106.1 C).  I have, once or twice, had it be ready at a slightly lower temperature, which is why I tell you to start testing at 218F.

Test again on a clean cold plate with each successively higher degree in temperature.  The marmalade is ready when you test it and it mounds up, a little like an egg yolk, is not runny when you tilt the plate, and when you poke the surface of the blob and you get a little wrinkling in the surface.  That means the pectin is gelling properly.

The instant this happens, turn off the heat under the marmalade and ladle it into your prepared jars.  Leave about 1/2 inch head space.  Lid and band your jars and process in a boiling water bath 10 minutes.  After removing the jars from the processing bath, let cool completely and check the seals on the jars before storing in a cool, dark place.

A batch that starts with 6 cups of lemons will make a generous two quarts of marmalade.

                          

So, while I rolled out graham cracker dough, I had the Belovedary root through the freezer and tell me what was in there.  It took about 15 minutes.  I am pleased to say that nothing was unidentifiable.  Still, we threw out a few things that I realized had been in there long enough that they would more than supply your Recommended Daily Allowance for freezerburn.  And we craftily consolidated the multiple different small containers of meat scraps that I save for stock-making, which freed up not only space but several reusable plastic containers.

The best part, though, was finding a bunch of things we realized we would enjoy eating.  Most of which were already cooked — packages of things that had been cooked in bulk Once Upon A Time and then freezer-stored for Future Use.

Well, I have always said that I enjoy living In The Future.  You know, where the hot water comes out of a hole in the wall on demand, and you can talk to your friends who live thousands of miles away without having to travel, and doors that know when you want to go through them and open for you, just like on Star Trek.  So we decided to thaw some of the Future Use goodies out and use them here In The Future.  Because nothing, even in the freezer, stays edible forever.  Not even in The Future.  And wasting food is wasting money.  So.

The haul: a two-serving container of goat posole, a similar container of lamb shank tagine with lemons and olives, a pint of borlotti cooked in a chicken stock so rich it borders on a demi-glace, and a pint of mashed roasted pumpkin.

We also pulled out the butt end of a ham, because I have a new batch of sauerkraut that is almost ripe and I have been craving a big fat pot of jota and jota is good with ham shreds and ham stock.

All of them have been thawing, slowly, in the fridge.

It’s a good time of year for soupy and stewish things, and we’re having a lovely time eating through these, with some fresh veg along for the ride.

I feel all triumphant about this.  We have freezer space again!  And the delightful sensation of having discovered free food!  (Even though we did buy everything that went into it.  Just not recently.  So it feels like free food.  This is one of the chief joys of shopping in your larder instead of the grocery store.)

I note that it’s also a good time of year for things you don’t have to spend ages cooking, for many people.  If you have lurking caches of prepared food in your freezer, soupy/stewish or otherwise, it is in fact likely that mid-December’s mad rush is precisely the sort of occasion for which you originally stored them away.

Thus I present the following to you as an experiment and a challenge:

Go root through your freezer and find out what’s in there.  You only have to do it for 15 minutes.  If you’re not done by then you have my permission to stop.

Pull out anything you can’t recognize or that looks like it was carved from the haunch of a Tauntaun a very long time ago, and get rid of it, because you won’t eat it.

Of the things that are still edible-looking, select 3 or 4 and take them out (possibly placing them in the refrigerator) to defrost.

Eat them.  Give yourself several days for the fridge defrosting if you go that route.  But eat them.  Yum them up and be delighted in your own prudence and foresight at having stored such things for yourself.

I am betting you will find some good stuff lurking in the frosty depths.  Either stuff that is already prepared and just needs defrosting, or stuff that could be easily converted into prepared food if you just defrosted the damn thing.

Do it as an experiment.  Then let me know how it went.  I’m perennially curious what lurks in other folks’ pantries and fridges and freezers.  I can’t wait to hear what you find.

                          

It came to me this morning while I was rolling out dough for Nancy Silverton’s awesomesauce graham cracker recipe (make them with whole wheat pastry flour!) that I had a sizeable two year old bottle of homemade limoncello in the cupboard and that at the rate we drink, it was likely to continue being there until it was old enough to vote.

It further occurred to me that I had a box of empty, clean small blue glass bottles, with screwtop lids, in the cellar, from some bygone experiment in bottling my own seasoning oils (verdict: need different lids, sesame oil and mixtures containing it “travel” as if by magic and get absolutely everywhere).

I put the first and second together and now we have 16 small blue glass bottles full of what turns out to be a nice mellow not overly sweet two year old homemade limoncello.  A little more effort and rummaging around the house and they all had labels and little scraps of ribbon around the necks.

What this means is that my Belovedary has wee gifties for all his work people, and we have wee gifties for the kinds of frequently-encountered people for whom one ends up needing to produce wee gifties.  Effectively for free.

As a result of this round of successful impromptu householderly resourcefulness, I shall purchase quite a bit of vodka tomorrow and use it to turn the syrup left over from the weekend’s candying of five pounds of ginger into a ginger liqueur that perhaps we can pass out next year.

Why have I been candying five pounds of ginger?  Because when you candy your own, you can cook it down so that the sugar caramelizes just the slightest bit, and the heat of the ginger mellows a little, and it’s so, so, so much more nuanced and interesting than the sometimes harsh, all-in-front sugar bomb of the commercial kind.  It’s an involved project and takes a substantial amount of time, though mostly you can ignore it as it simmers; my batches usually take most of two days of cooking time.  I usually end up doing it only every other year, partly for this reason.  Because it does take so long, you might as well not bother unless you’re going to do enough to make it worth the while.  Go big or go home, as they say.

Should you wish to candy your own ginger, you will require peeled fresh ginger root, cut into whatever sorts of chunks or slices you favor, and a sufficient quantity of sugar syrup that the ginger can swim about freely in its hot sticky bath.  Make a syrup at a ratio of 6 cups sugar to 2 cups water.  Simmer the syrup, stirring regularly, until it clarifies, and add the ginger.  Bring back to a low simmer and cook until the ginger is how you like it.  I like it cooked enough so that the thickest slices (about as thick as my pinkie finger) are translucent and the syrup has turned a clear golden brown, roughly orange-blossom honey color.  The syrup will cook down somewhat and become thicker as the process goes along; if it becomes too thick too quickly, add some boiling water and turn your heat down under the pot.

If you find you have more cooking to do than day to do it in, just cover the pot, turn off the heat, and let the ginger sit in the syrup.  Heat it up again the next day (low flame please) and you’re back in business.

Dry the candied ginger on wire racks over some sort of drip-catcher for 12-24 hours, then toss with granulated sugar to “sand.”  Alternately, pack the candied ginger in its syrup in clean, nonreactive jars or pots and cover tightly.

Whatever syrup you have left over you may combine to your tastes with vodka or other neutral spirits, to make ginger liqueur.  Pour it into clean bottles and let it age for a few months, then strain through a cloth, correct the sugar if needed, pour it back into (clean) bottles, and let it sit a little longer.   The longer it sits, the smoother it gets.  You can make liqueurs using the syrup left over from candying any fruit.

Do we think ginger liqueur wants to be acquainted with lemon zest, tangerine zest, a little cinnamon, and perhaps a clove or two?  I think I kinda do.

                          

In the intervening two years I have watched, primarily from the sidelines, as people have talked an endless everything-old-is-new-again game about canning and preserving.

I’ve learned a few things that have been useful, because whenever you get a lot of people playing with a particular technique, some interesting and worthwhile things are bound to develop, and I will be the first to admit that there have been plenty of people with great talent and ingenuity applying it to the crafts of preserves-making.  Hell, my pantry, and a shelf in my fridge door, are shrines to one of them: there is a young Nigerian woman who sells at my local farmers’ market who is a freaking jam goddess.  Her grapefruit and lime marmalade is an answered prayer, people, and I am not remotely kidding.

I’ve also watched in utter horror as people have described, on forums and email lists and in person, things I would never have dreamt people would think to try to do.  Because of course, as happens whenever something becomes trendy, there are people who want to do it just because it’s cool, without having to spend the time actually learning boring things like how to do it properly or even safely.

The science behind canning food is not, in fact, terribly complicated.  I can explain it thoroughly — have done so many times — in about a half an hour, and there are quite a few good books on the subject.  (The classic reference I use and recommend is Putting Food By.)    It’s not hard to learn or hard to implement.

But it is also not, given things like salmonella and botulism, a trivial matter when it comes to canning and preserving food.  The fact that the canning debacles about which I have heard have not  left more devastation in their wake — at least to which I have been privy — astounds me and is probably a very powerful testimonial to the resilience of the human body.  People will occasionally state, without the slightest appearance of hesitation or uncertainty, that they are doing things canning-wise that leave me gasping like a dying fish.  For example,  that they’ve been (and how I wish I were making this up) canning homemade duxelles for later use using a hot water bath process.

If you don’t know enough about canning to know what this signifies, that’s okay.  Suffice to say that it is a Bad Idea: a serious and potentially deadly mismatch between the type of food being canned and the method being used to can it. I hear about these things and it makes me shake my tiny fists in impotent rage.  What are they thinking?  But most of the time, these things are also being reported in the past tense, and alea jacta est, so I open my cranky fists and let my frustration flow right out through my spread fingers.  Life is too short to obsess about other people’s canning mistakes.   I just don’t sample canned goods made by folks I don’t know well enough to trust to have done it right.

There is, however, one canning-trend issue with which I have a mastodon-femur-sized bone to pick, and so I will briefly pick it here.  This is the laughable, and incessantly repeated, notion that knowing how to can food makes one (more) self-sufficient.

This would, indeed, be true if you were, in fact, growing your own food, and preserving your harvest for later.  That’s the image many people carry around in their heads, the farmer (or more likely, farmer’s wife) with her cellar full of jars of all the good things they grew all summer, preserved perfectly in gleaming rows that will get them through the long cold winter and subsequent spring with an abundant supply of fruits and vegetables and all kinds of other wonderful things.

There are folks who still do this.  No question.  For them, canning and preserving are indeed one part of their food self-sufficiency cycle.  No arguments.  But — and this is a big but — it is a cycle.  The canning and preserving is part of their life’s work, literally, but it is just one part.  They prepare the soil and plant the seeds and weed the rows and water the seedlings and weed some more and water and weed and harvest and clean and prepare and chop and cook and can, all so that they can eat.  It’s called subsistence farming, where the “subsistence” part is seriously personal.  It definitely prioritizes self-sufficiency, but doesn’t leave a lot of room for failure.  That’s the problem with self-sufficiency.  If you screw any part of it up, or if events simply conspire against you — crop failures, insect infestations, your root cellar floods — what you have to work with is no longer sufficient. Farmers and families  go hungry when these things happen.  Maybe they starve.

You, on the other hand, will not suffer actual deprivation, much less starvation, if every last one of the seals on your two dozen jars of dilly beans should happen to fail.  For the folks who can and preserve food as a hobby or a craft project or who preen themselves on their participation in such an “artisanal” process… well.  Self-sufficiency doesn’t actually enter the picture.  It is not even hanging around the edges waiting for its cue.

If you are buying the produce you’re preserving at a retail market (including farmers’ markets), growing it in a hobby garden (notoriously cost-inefficient because of scale), and canning in small batches, self-sufficiency isn’t even in the same area code.   Being able to give little half-pint jars of your raspberry jam to your family for Christmas, or even see yourself through the winter with your own homemade jam stash is not — no matter how ecstatically delicious the jam — the same as generating your own self-sufficient food supply.

It can’t be.  You’re not making enough.  You’re not making it in enough varieties.  You couldn’t be dependent on it if you tried.  (No woman can subsist on jam and dilly beans alone.  Not even if you also have applesauce.)

Moreover, small-batch canning and preserving costs far too much to represent economic self-sufficiency: if you cost out your ingredients (including gardening supplies if you grow your own), your equipment (including, again, garden stuff if that’s relevant), and your labor (ditto garden if ditto), you will find out precisely why that person selling small-batch jelly at the farmers’ market is charging three times as much for a half-pint jar of Concord grape jelly as you’ll pay for a quart jar what is substantially identical stuff at the supermarket.

There is nothing self-sufficient about hemorrhaging money and time. There’s nothing self-sufficient about producing a very small fraction of the food you require to survive at a cost that is substantially greater than what you would pay to buy a commercially produced product.  Like it or not, economies of scale are a real thing, even without unethical and predatory business practices added to the mix.  And if you are reading this, the vast, vast likelihood is that you do not, and never will, preserve your own food on a scale grand enough to make it a genuine matter of economic or material self-sufficiency.

The reality of the situation is that for virtually all urban canners and preservers, canning and preserving projects have nothing to do with self-sufficiency.  They are, in point of fact, self-indulgent.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t can or preserve food.  Far from it.  I no longer can food for the reasons my grandmother did. I don’t have a four-storey pear tree in the yard that produces more pears than anyone could possibly eat fresh, for one thing.  But I do can fruit, most years, and make some jams, sauces, and pie fillings.  I ferment and pickle and freeze, as well.  But I know full well I’m not going to be living off of what I put up for the rest of the year.  And I know better than to cost out — even mentally — the price of each pint jar of the brandied cherries I make most summers: the price of brandy means those wouldn’t be cheap even if I had my own trees.

I can and preserve because I enjoy the activity of canning and preserving.  I find it engaging and pleasant and often meditative.  I enjoy the pride in craftsmanship that comes from going out and handpicking my own blackberries — even if I do it at a local U-pick — so that I know that I’m getting the best ones I can find before I transform them into pie filling and jam and sorbet.  I like knowing exactly what is going into the food I’m going to eat or feed to people I care for.  I like knowing that the food I’m going to be eating and feeding to others has been handled well and prepared with care and attention to detail.  I like the “plink” of the jar lids sealing as they cool and I like the look of nice tidy rows of jars on my shelves. I like food and I like feeling connected to the process of making food.  I like having the skill, and I like that it is potentially a useful and pragmatic skill, even if in my current life, it is definitely a luxury activity.

These are all excellent reasons to can and preserve food.  Just don’t kid yourself about the self-sufficiency thing.

And for heaven’s sake, read up on the relationship between food acidity and canning method, will you?  I understand it’s much harder to do so after one has died of botulism.

                          

What has it got in its bucketses?  Let’s take a look!

Why, it’s a big bucket of scratch-and-dent stone fruits!  Nectarines, white peaches, yellow peaches, and Shiro yellow plums.

I didn’t think to start taking pictures until we were more than halfway done processing the fruit, but the bucket was originally almost full.  The fruit came from a friend who is a local business owner… it’s all locally grown fruit, but due to bruises, mold, and spots of rot, not stuff that our friend can sell.  She offered me a bucket of the stuff that would otherwise go on the compost heap if I thought I had a use for it.  I leapt at the chance.

Why?  Why would I want a huge bucket full of fruit that no one else would buy?  Fruit that lots of people I know would consider rather revolting, honestly, and discard as inedible?

Because even fruit that looks like it’s way over the hill is often well worth your time.  That’s why.  Not only is it frugal to just cut away the bad bits and use what’s still good, not only does it respect the fruit and the people whose effort went into growing it, but if I’m honest, it’s some of the best-tasting, most fully ripe fruit you’ll ever put in your mouth.  The Belovedary and I snuck an awful lot of tastes while we were converting that bucket of fruit into nearly 18 cups of peeled, pared chunks, and oh man was it delicious.

Besides, for a great many cooking applications, there is no need whatsoever that the fruit be cosmetically perfect or even close.  It’s probably my inner Midwesterner showing, but every time I encounter a recipe for jelly, jam, or chutney that begins with the instruction to “choose ripe, firm, unblemished fruit” I want to scream a little.  If you’re chunking the fruit up into small pieces anyway, cooking it into a puree–or even more pertinently, turning it into clarified juice for a jelly–there is not going to be anything left that will tell you whether the fruit was unblemished or not when you began.  It simply does not matter. Same goes if you’re making cobbler, crisp, fool, clafoutis, slump, brown betty, turnovers, strudel, pudding, fruit soup, or pie, for crying out loud.  So give your poor fruit growers a break.  Give yourself a break.  Use up what’s good, regardless of what it looks like or whether you have to cut away some mushy bits or cope with a bit of rot or mold.  It won’t hurt you.

I mean, just look at that gorgeous fruit.  I won’t lie, we were a little tempted to just grab spoons and dive in, but we thought nearly 18 cups of fruit might be a little much even for us, so instead…

It was time for the Old Black Rum.  I added a cup of spiced black rum, and a little bit of water, and put the fruit into my ginormous off-brand slow-cooker (slow cookers are your friend when it’s hot, as it can do low/slow cooking without heating up the house).

In due time, this will all collapse into a puree… and eventually, by dint of cooking it forever with the lid off at a low temperature, into a rich, delicious, lightly spiced, nicely thick fruit butter.  Which at some point later in the week, when the weather (I hope and pray) breaks a little, I will pack into jars and seal in a hot-water bath.

Then, this winter, when memories are all we have of fresh stone fruit, we can bust out the Scratch And Dent Stone Fruit Butter, and eat and be happy.  Not bad, for a bucket of throwaway fruit.

                          

Quick Pickled Onion

Peel, trim, and halve an onion. (Red, yellow, whatever you’ve got is fine.) Slice thinly and place in a heatproof, nonreactive bowl. Pour boiling water over the onion and let stand for about 10 minutes. While it is standing, in another bowl mix 1 cup rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar, 3-4 Tablespoons sugar (to taste), and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt until the salt and sugar are dissolved. Drain water from onions. Pour vinegar mixture over onions and let stand as long as desired, but at least an hour or two. You can store the onions in the vinegar mixture. Do not discard the vinegar mixture when the onions are gone, you can use it for more onions, or you can add other vegetables to it — thinly sliced cucumber or celery or carrot, etc., if wilted briefly in a boiling-water bath, are all nice.

                          

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.