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&MARTHA STANITZ
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An easy way to bottle up some of your garden's best
moments.
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Pickles capture the essence of summer. They can be spicy as
a breeze off the flower bed, or sharp as sudden lightning;
sweet as slow July evenings, hot as long August nights.
When you put up pickles, you preserve, warm memories for
the cold days ahead.
Pickling is an easy way of "putting food by." The recipes
here are all for fresh-pack, or quick-process,
pickles—which you can turn out in an
afternoon—rather than for brined, or fermented,
pickles, which may take several weeks. Each recipe involves
merely cleaning and cutting the vegetables to appropriate
lengths; preparing a vinegar-based pickling liquid; packing
the vegetables and liquid in containers; and either
immersing the jars in boiling water for a few minutes or
allowing the pickles to age in the refrigerator until their
flavors have mellowed.
Before you gather up all those excess vegetables your
garden is producing and go to work, get hold of a good
canning guide. The standard one is the USDA's Complete
Guide to Home Canning, Preserving and Freezing ($4.80
postpaid from Dover Publications, 180 Varick St., New York,
NY 10014). A few tips should serve to give you an idea of
what you're getting into.
Ingredients: Vegetables should be fresh,
firm and free of mold and blemishes. If possible, use only
pickling (pure granulated) salt; it has no iodine (which
darkens the pickles) or anticaking agents (which cloud the
liquid). If pickling salt is unavailable, just use
non-iodized table salt and resign yourself to murky brine.
Vinegar must be between 4% and 6% acid; homemade or gourmet
vinegars of unknown acidity simply aren't safe as
preservatives. Either white or cider vinegar will do,
according to your taste; white is preferable for
light-colored vegetables, since cider will darken them. If
you use garlic (as several recipes call for), keep in mind
that it harbors bacteria that can cause spoilage. Before
adding it to the jars, peel the cloves and boil them for 1
minute in water or in the vinegar solution.
PICKLES
Don't stop at cukes. Pickle zukes, tomatoes,
carrots, beans and peas.
Utensils: Pans for heating the pickling
liquid should be enamel, stainless steel or glass, copper,
galvanized or iron utensils may produce off-colors or form
undesirable compounds. You'll need a water-bath
canner—a large pot with a tight-fitting lid and a
rack to hold canning jars. (Inexpensive models —$10
or so—are often available at discount and hardware
stores.) Jars should be the kind sold specifically for home
canning: glass jars with two-piece metal caps (a flat metal
lid and a metal screw band). Don't reuse leftover
containers from supermarket foods; they won't seal
properly.
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