The House of Cooking Part 5: Bring Me the Head of the House of Cooking

I'm going to toot my own horn here for a moment: I make great pickles.Not like cucumber pickles, which I've never actually made (but the theory is effectively the same) but high acid pickled vegetables and sauces.

The reason I make great pickles is that I follow the recipe (for the most part) without deviation, because the secret to pickling is that for it to work the acidity levels need to be precise, the processing time in the canner needs to be precise (especially because I don't use a pressure canner) and every step you follow needs to be on the dot and crossed of the tees and spot on and kosher and rigid... etc.

And for someone who does not otherwise follow recipes very well, I'm surprised by how easy I find it to actually follow a pickle recipe.

The reason, I suppose, is in the repercussions. If I muck up a standard recipe, at worst I'm going to get some funky tasting food. If I muck up the acidity levels in a jar of pickled beans, I've got a botulism problem on my hands. I'd rather err on the side of not-botulism and stick to the recipe than wing it. Luckily enough, sticking to the recipe yields some great pickled products. My go-to recipe guides are the Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving and of course, the "Joy of Cooking".

Both are resources not only for pickling recipes for both low and high acid canning (I do high acid, since I have no pressure canner) but are great tools to figure out what NOT to do. This is a big one. The tips on how to avoid giving your family botulism are absolutely vital.

Now, having said that I follow the recipes to the letter is true, to a point, in that when it comes to the level of acid and salt required by the recipe, as well as the volume of vegetables used, etc, I do not deviate. However, when it comes to some of the ingredients I will occasionally play around a bit. Especially when it comes to non-vital ingredients like spices.

For example, D hates waste, and there are so many recipes that use tomatoes that say to peel and core and seed the tomatoes first. Why? You've just wasted half the tomato. For my recent spate of cooking, I used the whole tomato and threw caution to the winds. Net result: 6 jars of salsa, 12 jars of some VERY nice if spicy chili sauce, and 6 jars of plain jane tomato sauce, no embellishment. I used a total of about 60 tomatoes to make that, plus sundry ingredients. Not a single one was peeled or seeded or cored.

For the chili sauce mentioned above, I used Bernardin's recipe for Hot 'n' Sweet Chili sauce, but when I tripled the recipe (I bought tomatoes in bulk) and the end result was 4 1/2 cups of sugar as a required component, I said screw that and cut out 1 1/2 cups of sugar and still felt like I should have cut out more. Frankly, I don't care if it's spread over 12 jars, that's a fuck tonne of sugar and I don't need to give myself or anyone else diabetes.

I also used jalapenos instead of hot peppers, and I did not seed them. For anyone who knows nothing about hot peppers, leaving the seeds in increases the spiciness of the dish to an exponential degree, regardless of the dish. I also omitted the pears the sauce called for (though not on purpose, as I just plain forgot to do them up... 24 tomatoes, 18 jalapeno peppers, 3 onions, 3 red peppers, 6 peaches, 3 apples all finely chopped... so I forgot the pears, sue me) The end result was a sweet but spicy, flavour packed sauce that I think I will be enjoying for a couple of years, given it will be too spicy for D and I can only consume so much chili sauce on my own.

The point is that if you understand how to balance the acidity of the brine to the ingredients used, you can play with some of the core ingredients themselves and still come up with a lovely pickle. You can also create a disaster, taste wise. Be careful when using cider vinegar as even though it contains the right acidity level (5%) it is dramatically sweeter than white vinegar, more so than you would think possible, especially if not balanced against the correct level of pickling salt. If you like sweet pickles, that's great. I don't like sweet pickles, and in an attempt to make pickled carrots one session I ended up with carrots that tasted like candy... something my extended family enjoyed just fine but that I can only stomach the smallest portion of. It was a mixed success, and I learned a lesson about how to be careful with playing around with a recipe, but ultimately I still created a successful preserve because regardless of taste I had the right level of acid to ensure that bacteria growth would not occur, and processed the pickles in the canner to ensure their longevity.

So my recommendation, and this is coming from someone who has unequivocally, regardless of my own personal opinion of what I have produced, received nothing but thumbs up commendations from anyone who has tried my pickles, is to start with one recipe for pickles that speaks to you, and follow it precisely. Figure out the timing on your canner. It takes about an hour to heat up, but if you leave it boiling too long, you'll lose volume to steam and may not be able to fully submerge your jars if you lose too much water. You also have to time your recipe so that it's ready to drop into the jars just after your canner comes to a boil, but not before (you don't want your mix to cool before you can get it in the canner) and all of this comes down to learning the timing, practice, and probably a few failures. So start simple, basic, but choose a recipe you think you'll like the results of and then make as big a batch as you can stomach making. 8-12 jars is a nice number, as this allows you to keep some for personal consumption and also share some with friends to hear them say how good it is.

My personal favourite is pickled garlic, but I will warn you in advance that unless you want to spend literally four hours peeling garlic cloves to produce 5 jars of pickled garlic, find a source of pre-peeled cloves you can use. I have a fairly efficient method of peeling garlic and I still spent 6 hours peeling 30 heads of garlic and pickling them. I will devour the results once they are cured a bit, but if my supplier hadn't been out of the pre-peeled cloves I wanted I would have saved myself 3 1/2 hours of mind numbing labour.

Having made in my time pickled garlic, salsa, chili sauce, tomato sauce, pickled beets, mustard beans, dilled beans, pickled carrots, and other pickles, the thing I enjoy about canning isn't necessarily in the process. It's time consuming, sometimes boring, often hot and frustrating and makes you wish you could cut a corner here and there. No, the enjoyment lies in knowing that a few weeks from when all that bullshit is done, when you have forgotten how much your hands ache from all that chopping and first crack open one of those jars and feel the tang of vinegar at the back of your nose, when the waft of other flavours and spices follows in its wake until your mouth waters for the smallest taste, and you know that regardless of the effort you went to what you are about to taste is something wholly created by you. And it's made from science you in most circumstances barely understand, and from a love for creating something that not only tastes great but can last a good long time and be shared with friends and family without worrying about when it may go bad, or rotten.

And if you have the right group of friends, properly motivated, get together and do your canning together. Everybody pick a recipe and then swap jars with each other. Spend a day at it, drink wine (sometimes a required ingredient depending on the recipe, so stock up), talk about your kids or your lawn or your job, or whatever. Regardless of whether you are a man or a woman interested in canning, it's a better experience with a group of people of similar inclination. Although all my canning has been done solitary, that's more a comment on me as a person than on canning as a hobby or an experience.

The most important thing is to enjoy, relax, and anticipate what you'll be creating. It's a fun experience, when all's said and done.


A quick list of essential tools: 
Recipe guides (regardless of publisher, these are NECESSARY)
Water Bath Canner
Large Stock pot
Canning funnel
Magnetic lid probe (that sounds dirty, but it's a wand with a magnet at the end that let's you snag hot snap lids out of a pot without singing your fingers.)
Mason jars, and lots of them. For your first experience with canning, pick up two lots of 12 jars... I say this because once you make your first batch, you'll want to try something else.
Pickling spice
Coarse Salt
White vinegar (2x 4L jugs on hand is not insane):
Cheese cloth
Silicon Jar Gripper
Large and small measuring cups. Big glass cup a good idea, between 4-8 cups size, as well as the smaller 1/4- 1  cup sets.
Dill seed, mustard seed, whole cloves, black and green peppercorns... a selection of whole spices
Counter space: this is important because your newly prepped jars will need to rest for 24 hours before being moved to the pantry. Plan ahead.