Tips and Tricks for Pickling at Home
Clever Cookstr chats with Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alpern, the team behind Gefilteria, to get their expert tips and tricks for making pickles and sauerkraut at home.
Welcome to the Clever Cookstr, your ultimate window into the kitchens of the world’s best cooks.
Our guests today are Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alpern, the team behind Gefilteria, a boutique purveyor of Old World Jewish foods. They’re here today to share some tips and tricks for making pickles and sauerkraut at home.
CC: Pickles are a great way to use the bounty of summer produce and preserve what you might not get through during the season. What are some of your favorite things to pickle?
JY: I don’t even know where to begin! I love cucumbers and dill, and love harvesting cucumbers when I have access to a garden. There’s something so summery and crisp about a sour garlic pickle.
LA: My favorite thing to pickle is cabbage. I basically eat sauerkraut with every meal, once I’ve got jars of it on hand. It goes with everything, and I serve it all the time.
JY: One of my favorite things about summer is that it’s a time to experiment and explore. So while I typically like to pickle vegetables and do a naturally fermented pickle, I also like to try other things. Right now I’m pickling grapes. I found a recipe that someone tried out, and it has mustard seeds, cinnamon, peppercorns, and black grapes, in white wine vinegar. It’s really refreshing and so summery. Every summer, I like to try something new.
CC: I think that texture is one of the most important things when you’re pickling almost any vegetable. There’s something really awful about a mushy pickle. So how do you get that really crisp and crunchy texture that makes that noise when you bite into it?
LA/JY: There are two pickle worlds: the world of vinegar pickles and the world of salt water pickles. There are a few tricks to get a crunchy pickle:
- Put your cucumbers in an ice water bath for 45 minutes-to-an hour before you start the pickling process.
- For classic sour pickles, do a salt water pickle. Use a tannin-rich leaf, such as a bay leaf, oak leaf, or currant leaf. The tannins will help keep your vegetables crunchier.
- Horseradish also works to keep pickles crunchy.
- Most importantly: use fresh produce! Good quality produce makes a good, crunchy pickle.
CC: What are some tips for making great sauerkraut?
LA: I love sauerkraut. Naturally fermented, probiotic, living sauerkraut is one of my favorite things. It’s important to be gentle with the cabbage. No smashing! You actually want to massage the salt into the sauerkraut; you don’t want to smush it. All the water will draw out as you just patiently massage it.
JY: The beautiful thing about cabbage is if you just salt and massage it, enough liquid will be extracted to then create the brine that the cabbage will ferment in. There’s no need to add water or anything else. All you need is salt and you can make an incredibly delicious, fresh-tasting sauerkraut. It does take time–you have to wait for the juices to extract–and it does take patience.
CC: I think one of the things people get nervous about when they’re making pickles at home is food safety. When you have something that’s fermenting. and that takes a long time to be ready, how do you know that you’re storing it correctly?
LA: So, if we’re talking about the world of fermentation, that’s not the same as canning. We don’t have to worry about botulism. We’re just talking about general food safety. So as in any type of food prep, you want to make sure your surfaces are clean, your hands are clean, and whatever vessel you’re putting things in is clean. I’m lucky enough to have a dishwasher; that’s a great way to get things very clean and very hygenic. Keeping your hands clean is critical in all things, but particularly when you’re fermenting.
JY: If you’re fermenting sauerkraut in a very hot kitchen, it can affect the fermentation process. It can affect what kind of bacteria can thrive. That also might change the taste. Typically, I don’t like to leave things fermenting in a hot kitchen for too long, so if you’re doing a three- or four-day pickle (which would be a good half- to three-quarters sour pickle), that works–but a month-long sauerkraut wouldn’t be good in those conditions. If you can get a steady room temperature, that’s a good way to be safe.
We’re of the school of “wild fermentation”–meaning, don’t stress! If something tastes funky, just get rid of it. Compost it. It’s not the end of the world–just try it again. That’s the beautiful part of it. What I like to talk about is experimentation. Every time you work with natural bacteria, the product will be different. That really means it’s a time to experiement, to play. Trust your instincts. If it tastes weird, then throw it out! You won’t get sick from having something taste funky, it might just not be good. The risk is more in the flavor.
CC: Is there specific equipment that you need to make pickles at home? What should you be using to pickle different vegetables?
JY: Vinegar pickles and naturally fermented saltwater pickles are different, but typically, for naturally fermented pickles you don’t want to use plastic, unless it’s a really high quality, food-grade plastic. That’s number two plastic, and there should be four letters, HDPE, on the vessel. Otherwise, stick to ceramic: there are beautiful ceramic crocks that look lovely to display as you’re pickling. Glass is another good option, as is wood, if you have an old wooden barrel or something along those lines.
For vinegar pickles, again, if you’re using a hot vinegar brine, you don’t want to use plastic unless it’s a food-grade plastic.
LA: I want to add something that’s very important, which is that when you open the crock or jar, you may indeed see some mold floating on top of the vegetable or fruit that you’re fermenting. Don’t be afraid of that mold! In fact, we think it can be quite beautiful. Generally, what we suggest is that you just skim that mold right off. Don’t eat it, but don’t be afraid of it. It doesn’t mean your pickles have gone bad. Just grab a spoon and skim it right off. Everything underneath is fine. If on top there are a few pieces of vegetables that are soft, you might want to throw those out as well.
JY: You kind of become a mold nerd as you ferment more. You start to appreciate the different types of mold! Cheese has mold, and all fermented foods include mold as part of the process. It’s not anything to be worried about!
CC: I want to talk a bit about food pairings. What do you serve pickles with, besides a deli sandwich? How do you work them into everyday meals?
LA: One of the things I love to do is use pickled beets in a salad with goat cheese, spinach, amd some sort of nut. That’s a wonderful use. That’s a very different thing than a dill pickle! One of the things Jeffrey and I do a lot is start meals with a pickle platter. It’s such a wonderful way to open up your palate–it’s light, it’s refreshing, it doesn’t fill you up, and if you’re using naturally fermented pickles, it really opens up your whole system to receive whatever foods you’re going to eat next. Pickles as an opener to any meal are an amazing, colorful thing to present to people.
JY: We’ve also done hors d’oeuvres where we serve a fermented dill pickle with mustard and cheddar cheese. I would say, again, a sweet vinegar pickle will be different than a salt water pickle. If you take some of the brine from a fermented pickle, that’s chock full of all the bacteria that’s naturally healthy and good for your gut. You can make that into a salad dressing instead of using a vinegar. Mix it with some tahini, and it’s a live, cultured salad dressing.
Thanks so much for joining us, Jeffrey and Liz, and thanks for listening to the Clever Cookstr!
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Photos of sauerkraut, and pickled veggies courtesy of Shutterstock. Photos of Jeffrey and Liz, and pickles in water, courtesy of Jeffrey Yoskowitz and Liz Alpern.