Shani and I got together yesterday for our semi-monthly canning day, joined by Miss Hannah. Since we’ve done about all we care to with citrus fruit, we decided we would work on some pickled vegetables and a trial batch of making our own mustard.
Our morning was spent hitting three different stores in search of our ingredients, during which we committed the grave error of walking into Whole Foods hungry (and walking out with $50 worth of bread, cheese and olives for lunch as our penance) and never found the daikon we wanted for one recipe.
Prepping the vegetables and processing them took the entire afternoon, but for the first time ever, we were finished before midnight! We were even finished before (an admittedly late) dinner. Hannah was great as our measurer of spices, as these recipes wanted you to measure your spice into each jar instead of mixing them in with the brine. Undoubtedly this makes it a lot easy to make sure the spices are evenly distributed, but it also makes prepping the jars a more complicated process.
We found the pickling to be far faster and easier work than jam making, and got nearly the same amounts of yield in nearly half the time. In the end, we had about 20 pints of cauliflower, 7 pints of asian spicy carrots, 5 half pints of baby corn, 4 half pints of bread and butter jalapeños, and 2 half pints of Oktoberfest Beer mustard, plus a couple of wee sharing jars of peppers and mustard.
Carrots, baby corn, cauliflower, peppers on top. Are they not beautiful?
We had recipes that called for brown rice vinegar – which we did find at Whole Foods, but which was quite expensive. We bought one bottle of it, which was not nearly enough for our plans. But it did allow us to do a taste comparison so that we could figure out reasonable substitutions. We knew that the kind of vinegar we used wouldn’t matter, as long as they were equally or more acidic than what the recipe calls for, but we wanted to keep our flavor profiles as close as we could. Imagine, if you will, the three of us standing in the kitchen, with spoons, taking wee sips of all the vinegars we had on hand, trying to find the right combination. We found that the brown rice vinegar had a very malty flavor, and that a combination of apple cider and malt vinegar was likely close enough to get us what we wanted.
The mustard proved to be incredibly easy, and if it tastes anywhere near as good as it smells, I may never buy mustard again. It still astounds me how easy some of this stuff is to make for myself.
Now, we wait a week or so to let the flavors really settle in before cracking open the jars and trying them. The jury is still out whether I will make it that long.
Recipes: Bread and butter jalapeños came from a local restaurant, Octoberfest Beer mustard can from the Ball preserving book, and the cauliflower and carrot recipes came from Tart and Sweet. We did the corn in the same brine as the cauliflower recipe.