Carrot Pickles

Before we could preserve food by simply tucking it away in the refrigerator or freezer, techniques like drying, pickling, and smoking were the best way to preserve meat, fish, and vegetables. Root vegetables were an exception. Most root vegetables could be harvested in the summer and then stored in man-made caves or cellars until the spring. Carrots were often stored in barrels of dry sawdust with at least a thin layer of the sawdust separating one carrot from the next. Once in the barrel, the whole container went into the root cellar or cave where it would stay cool enough to keep the carrots from spoiling. Pickling carrots to preserve them may not be traditional but we can still pickle carrots just because they taste good.

There are two basic methods of pickling. The oldest form is probably bacterial fermentation brought about by immersing the vegetable into a salt-based brine. Almost as old is acid fermentation, usually done by immersing the vegetable in wine or vinegar.

Making sauerkraut

For years I’ve been making sauerkraut by massaging shredded cabbage with fine, non-iodized salt at a proportion of about three percent, by weight. After shredding the cabbage, I weigh it. The weight is multiplied by 0.03 to determine the weight of the salt to be used. The measured amount of salt is sprinkled evenly over the cabbage which is resting in a large bowl. Then the fun begins. Using both hands, I massage the cabbage until it produces copious amounts of water. Then I just pack the cabbage and the water that it’s thrown off into my fermenting jar. The jar’s nothing fancy. It’s just a square, six-liter plastic storage container. It turns out that the lactobacillus bacteria responsible for the fermentation is anaerobic so I take a zipper-lock plastic bag that is about the same size as the top of the container, fill it with a three-percent salt brine. I float the bag on top of the cabbage and its juices to allow the carbon dioxide produced by the fermentation to escape, but at the same time, to keep the cabbage submerged below the surface and not exposed to air. After a couple of weeks sitting on the counter in my kitchen, the sauerkraut is ready. I’m always amazed how the result is never salty.

A new-fangled pickling container

Recently, I obtained a pickling tool that combines the best of both Chinese and Japanese pickling jars in that it has a spring-load piece that keeps the vegetables below the level of the brine and an inverted cup that sits in a water-filled moat that prevents oxygen from getting to the fermenting vegetable. It’s a special lid that (mine’s from Kraut Source but there are several similar devices available) fits on any standard wide-mouth canning jar to make it an anaerobic pickling container.

Salt-fermented carrots

To ferment carrots, start by choosing a jar to pickle the carrots in. A clean, wide-mouth canning jar with straight sides makes it easy to get the carrots in and out. I find that a tall, one-pint size to be about right. Peel a sufficient amount of carrots to fill the jar when cut to length. If you can fine small, skinny carrots, I wouldn’t bother to peel them. I’d only cut them to a length where they will fit in the jar while leaving about 1 to 2 centimetres (3/8 to 3/4 inches) headspace. After peeling, if the carrots are thicker than about a centimetre (3/8 inch) I’d split them lengthwise, using a chef’s knife, into two or more pieces.

Once the carrots have been fit into the canning jar, remove them and determine how much they weigh. Multiply the weight by 0.03, and measure out that much salt. Table salt is fine, but not the iodized type. I tend to avoid fancy, unrefined salts for pickling because they may contain some calcium. The calcium can cause the pectin in the carrot to crosslink and become tough. I prefer finer grains of salt because they dissolve easier. Like I said, non-iodized table salt is perfectly fine for this application.

Massage the carrot strips and salt together to bring some of the carrots’ natural water to the surface. It’s hard to massage enough water out of a root vegetable, so don’t misplace any that comes out. After five minutes or so of massaging the carrot strips, repack them into the canning jar along with all the liquid they released and any undissolved salt crystals. If there isn’t enough liquid to cover the top tips of the carrots, add sufficient filtered water to the jar.

If you have one of the fancy fermenting lids like I mentioned above, attach that now according to the manufacturer’s instructions. If not, add a clean weight to the jar to hold the carrots below the liquid. Round, glass weights designed to fit wide-mouth jars are available online. Finish the fermentation jar by loosely attaching a one- or two-piece lid. The lid has to be loose enough to allow the carbon dioxide gas produced by the fermentation process to escape, or else your jar may explode.

Leave the jar on your countertop for a few weeks for the fermentation to be complete. A day or two after starting the fermentation, you should observe bubbles begin to form in the brine. You can begin to taste the pickles after a couple of weeks. If they taste fine to you, they’re done. If you’d like them a little sourer, leave them to ferment longer. The taste is totally up to you. Once the carrots are perfect, move the jar to your refrigerator to retard any further fermentation.

If you used a fancy fermenting lid, replace it with a regular lid. If you want to make the pickles shelf-stable, you’ll need to process them in boiling water for about 45 minutes. Unless you are making a large quantity that won’t reasonably fit in in your fridge, or you are planning to give the pickled carrots as gifts, I wouldn’t go to the extra effort to process the carrots. You can easily pickle other root vegetables this way. Actually, I can’t think of a vegetable I wouldn’t try. Thin-leaf vegetables such as spinach may not be strong enough, but just about anything else that is pulled out of the ground with work.

Miso-pickled carrots

If the method I just described of fermenting carrots with salt seems too complicated, consider using a Japanese method called misozuke. These are also salt-fermented pickles, but the fermentation is produced by immersing the item to be pickled in miso, a fermented soy-bean paste. Most miso pastes are about nine percent salt, more than enough salt to ferment whatever is placed in it.

Using miso, I’ve pickled radishes, endive, cucumbers, carrots, scallops, oysters, prawns, and unshelled eggs. (I wouldn’t start with eggs because they are the most difficult item to work with.) My fermenting time has varied from three days for the shellfish to one week for radishes to two weeks for the eggs to thirteen weeks for the endive.

My preference is to use shiro (white) miso because it has a milder flavor than the darker, red and brown miso pastes. Although I prefer to use Japanese brands, you may only find American brands at your local health-food store. If you are fortunate enough to live in an area that carries Asian, or better yet Japanese, products obtaining a variety of miso pastes should not be a problem.

Although you can easily pickle carrots cut into sticks, as described earlier, I think small carrots with their skins intact are best to use. It’s even more fun if you can find small carrots in a variety of colors for these pickles. The colors will become muted during the fermentation process, but they still should be recognizable. Trim the carrot stalks, if they are present down to about a 6 millimetres (1/4 inches) length. You should remove any brown ones, and any dirt or discolored area in the collar should be scraped out with the tip of a paring knife held in a choke grip. Alternatively, the entire crown can be trimmed off.

To ferment carrots with miso, place the carrots in a plastic bag that has some type of air-tight closure. Add a large spoonful or two of miso to the bag. Massage the miso through the bag walls around the carrots so that the carrots are mostly coated with the miso. Squeeze the carrots into a group inside the bag, expel as much air as you can from the bag, and seal the bag. A little air remaining is fine. Place the bag on a shelf in your refrigerator. I usually position the bag so the opening is up in case there’s a leak. Don’t put the carrots in the back of your refrigerator where you may forget them.

If you don’t want to do your fermentation in plastic, a covered, rectangular glass or ceramic bowl could be used. You’ll probably need a bit more miso to keep the carrots mostly submerged in the miso. Don’t be afraid to use your fingers, assuming they were washed after you changed the oil on your car, to mix the carrots and miso paste.

Each day for the first week, give the bag a quick massage, regroup the carrots, and return the container to your refrigerator. If using a hard container, give the carrots and miso a quick mix with your fingers. This reassures the carrots that you haven’t forgotten them. After a day or three, you’ll notice that the miso is no longer a paste, but has become diluted with water being exuded by the carrots. After a week of fermenting, taste a bit of one of the carrots. If the taste is to your liking, return the bag to your fridge a little longer. A day or two longer won’t hurt the fermentation.

Once the miso-fermented carrots are ready, rinse them well in cold water and drain them on paper towels. My preferred way of storing miso fermented pickles is to vacuum pack them, but simply placing them in a bag with a zipper closure if fine. The easiest place for me to store my finished pickles is in my refrigerator, so there they go. I’ve traveled long distances with these carrots at room temperature―though they go back into the refrigerator when I arrive―and so far, no one has gotten sick because of my pickles with frequent-flyer miles.

Acid fermentation

Acid fermentation is what most people think of when they hear the word pickle. For my entire childhood, I only knew of four type of pickles: kosher dills, bread and butter pickles, pickle relish, and pickled herring. If someone offered me a pickle, I expected a kosher dill. More than likely, if the pickle came from a jar, the label said Heinz on it. Once in a while my mother procured a pickle or two from a local deli. Those certainly were the best.

I never thought about making my own pickles of this type until a friend gave me a recipe she found in Bon Appétit magazine. The time coincided with when pickling cucumbers first appeared at my corner market. That was about twenty years ago. Every year since then, I’ve made some variety of that recipe at least once a summer. The recipe is titled Spicy Dill Pickles, and is still floating around on the Internet.

The basic concept of acid-fermented pickles is quite simple. Create a brine with an acidity of about 2.5 percent, add the item to be pickled along with whatever else you want, seal the jar, and wait until the pickles are ready. The acidity is easy to reach since most vinegars have their acidity displayed on their labels and tend to range between 5 and 6 percent. To get close to the ideal acidity, it is only necessary to dilute the vinegar by half with water.

To be more exact, think of the final volume of brine as being a combination of some amount of vinegar combined with sufficient water to make up that final volume. The question is how much vinegar and how much water. Start by dividing 2.5 by the acidity listed on the vinegar bottle. If the listed acidity is 7 percent, divide 2.5 by 7. The result is 0.36. So, 36 percent of the final volume will be the vinegar, and the remainder, or 64 percent will be water.

I generally use either distilled wine vinegar or white-wine vinegar, both of which can be obtained inexpensively in a gallon or three-liter jug. Just remember to check the acidity before you dilute it. I currently have a Spanish sherry vinegar at eight percent acidity, a common-consumer cider vinegar at five percent acidity, and a Japanese rice vinegar at four percent acidity in my cupboard. Read the label before you start and then do your math. Twice.

Some exotic fruit vinegars can be fantastic on a green salad and may be great for pickles, or maybe not. I can’t predict how the pickles will taste, but I can predict that they will be more expensive to produce. Start with simple, unflavored vinegars before expanding your pickle environment.

Typical recipes also called for the addition of a little salt. I suspect that the salt concentration is low because the salt is added more for seasoning than to encourage lactic-acid fermentation.

Older pickle recipes often called for pasteurization and pressure canning of the pickles to make them shelf stable. The pasteurization killed the bacteria present on the pickle ingredients. The pressure canning was performed to eliminate any botulism spores present and would have multiplied in the anaerobic condition created if the pickles were canned after only undergoing water processing. With our large, modern refrigerators, those steps are no longer necessary unless you want to store the pickles for a long time.

Keeping pickles crisp

Since pasteurization involves cooking the cucumbers in their pickling liquid, there’s an extra step required to produce the crisp pickle that we all want and expect when we open the jar. To keep cucumbers from going all mush, a pre-cooking soak in pickling lime (calcium hydroxide), which makes the pectin in the cucumbers crosslink and that produces the desired snap when you bite your pickle. A twenty-four soak in a five-percent pickling lime solution, cucumbers can be boiled for hours without losing their crispness.

Acid-fermented carrot pickles

The simplest method for making carrot pickles would be to mix distilled white vinegar with a five percent acidity half-and-half with filtered water. I recommend filtered water to ensure that there isn’t too much calcium in the water. The calcium, like pickling lime, could crosslink the abundant pectin present in the carrots causing the resulting pickles to become tough. For each pint of pickling liquid, I add about a teaspoon of table salt for seasoning. I combine the liquid with carrot spears in a jar with a glass weight on the carrot spears so that they remain submerged. The jar then goes in the back of my refrigerator, and a note as to when the pickling started is added to my smart phone. After about ten days to two weeks, I’ll check the pickles for flavor. Once ready to eat, the jar of carrot pickles is just kept in the back of my refrigerator until its contents are gone. This is the minimum, simplest recipe. If you want to make your life, or your pickles, more complicated, read further.

Determining liquid quantity

To determine how much pickling liquid you’ll need, first prepare the carrots and pack them into your canning jar. Next, fill the jar with filtered water until the water reaches the top. If you are using a glass weight or similar device to hold the carrots in the pickling liquid, add that to the jar also. Next, carefully pour the water into a measuring cup. The amount of liquid in the cup should be a little more than the final amount of pickling liquid you’ll need in the end. I always spill a little so I make a touch extra. If you used tap water to do the measurement, rinse and drain the carrots in filtered water to minimize any minerals left from the tap water. To make your calculations simpler, round your pickling liquid volume up to a convenient amount, say cups or pints if you are using standard US measurements or hundreds of milliliters if you are using metric measurements.