Hidden Pickles

Wouldn't you know it. Just when I was thinking we might never see ripe cucumbers I ran across a bunch of them hiding in the garden.

Cucumbers can be sneaky devils. They don't make a sound. They hide amongst the foliage and if you don't look for them carefully, you won't see them until they're the size of footballs. I got these at just the right moment. The largest is no more than about five inches long. They were way down low where I was trimming the grass along the edge of the cucumber bed. You have to move a few leaves to the side to spot them.

I grow my cucumbers for pickling and there are a couple of issues to consider. First, I don't have many ready to pick yet. I could purchase more at the Whole Foods, but I decided to just use my own and make a small batch. Secondly, my preferred method is to ferment the cucumbers for a deli-style sour pickle. But it's a little warm this time of year. The ideal fermentation temperature is around 68 degrees. I'll just have to find a relatively cool place in the house to stash them.

First I measured enough water to generously cover my pickles and it came to 1 1/2 quarts (six cups). To make "half-sours," I dissolve 3 tablespoons pure sea salt (no additives, or use pickling salt) in the water and pour it into a small plastic food-grade bucket. Add the cucumbers sliced in half lengthwise. Then from the garden I harvested nearly a whole dill plant--the seed head and several branches. I cut these from the stem and added them to the bucket, along with cloves from two heads of our home-grown garlic and about a dozen black peppercorns.

Cover the pickles with a ceramic plate that just fits inside the bucket, and weigh this down with a sealed plastic container filled with water. Cover everything with a clean dish towel to keep the dust out and place the bucket in a dark, cool spot, maybe in the basement.

Check on the pickles in a couple of days. They're done when they taste just right to you, maybe in a week. To stop the fermentation, put the pickles in their brine in the refrigerator. You can also boil the brine to kill the bacteria, then chill it and add the pickles later.

I will be keeping an eye on these and reporting on their progress as time goes by.

Kids Make Yogurt, Then Strawberry Smoothies

Here's the dirty little secret about yogurt: If people knew how easy it was to make it, there wouldn't be nearly such a need for it in the dairy case.

Making yogurt is as simple as heating milk on the stove for a few minutes then inoculating it with a live yogurt culture. It's an overnight fermentation process similar to the one we use to make our sauerkraut. The key ingredient is the bacteria that go to work on the sugars (lactose) in the milk, lowering the pH to a more acid environment, which creates a distinctively sour flavor and also gives yogurt its keeping quality.

I consider yogurt making one of the many kitchen miracles that expose the kids in my "food appreciation" classes to the science of cooking--in this case some of the biological aspects of cooking. Having discovered the beneficial effects that microbes can have on food, humans have been making and eating yogurt for millenia.

According to food authority Harold McGee, the word "yogurt" comes from the Turkish root for "thick." Heating the milk prior to fermentation changes the structure of milk proteins, causing them to link together. All of this remained a mere curiosity to most Westerners until the 20th Century, when the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Ilya Methnikov linked yogurt consumption to the health and longevity of certain groups in Bulgaria, Russia, France and the United States.

Now yogurt has an immediate association with healthful eating, although fat, saturated fat and cholesterol are still important considerations, as with any dairy product. Kids usually are a bit put off by the sourness of plain yogurt, but immediately warm to the idea of adding fruit to create a smoothie. Smoothies are a great way to package body-building proteins with the nutritional benefits of fresh fruit.

To make a batch of fresh yogurt at home, start with a quart of the best whole milk you can find. In a pot over moderate heat, bring the milk to 195 degrees (17 degrees below the boiling point). Use an instant-read thermometer or a candy thermometer to monitor the milk's temperature and adjust the burner as needed.

Lower the heat and continue cooking for ten minutes at 195 degrees, then remove the pot from the heat and place it in a large bowl partially filled with cold water. Again using a thermometer, bring the temperature of the milk down to 110 degrees. Now stir in 1 tablespoon plain yogurt containing active cultures. (Read the label on the yogurt container. It will say whether it contains live cultures.) Pour the milk into a warm quart jar and place the jar in a cooler with several jars or a small bucket of hot water. Close the lid on the cooler and allow the yogurt to ferment overnight, or up to 18 hours.

The reason for lowering the temperature of the milk after cooking is to create an environment in which the bacteria can thrive and multiply. The warm cooler also accelerates the fermentation process. The miracle result is a quart jar full of thick, luscious yogurt you can begin to enjoy immediately.

It seems that every family has its own way of making smoothies. Our recipe is as follows: In a blender jar, place 1 peeled banana, 2 heaping cups of cleaned and stemmed strawberries (about 1 pound), 1/2 cup plain yogurt, 1/2 cup orange juice and 1 1/2 tablespoons honey. Blend until thoroughly mixed. Then add about 1 cup ice cubes, cover and blend until completely smooth.

Even kids who don't normally eat yogurt love smoothies made with this distinctive dairy product.

Note: Children allergic to milk should not eat yogurt. However, people who are lactose intolerant may be able to enjoy yogurt, since the lactose in the milk has been consumed during the fermentation process.

Kids Make German Meatballs

More than a month ago the kids in my "food appreciation" classes here in the District of Columbia peeled a bunch of turnips and turned them into sauerruben, basically the turnip equivalent of sauerkraut.

The turnips were mixed with sea salt and pressed into a heavy-duty plastic bucket, where they have remained in one of the colder back rooms of our house ever since, fermenting ever so peacefully.

Today, I decided, was time to unveil our sauerruben to the kids who made it. But I couldn't see just plopping a lump of fermented turnips in front of them. We needed something to create pizazz, some buzz. We needed a show-stopper food partner that would give these turnips the lift they deserved.

Why not...meat balls?

By way of the internet I was steered right back to The Joy of Cooking and a recipe for German meatballs that I've modified slightly. What could be better than German meatballs to go with sauerruben? That, in fact, is a very good question, since I completely struck out when I went searching for recipes that employ sauerruben in an actual meal--even in my small collection of German cookbooks (lots of sauerbraten, sauerkraut, sausages--no sauerruben).

There are plenty of reasons for caution when cooking meat and with children. Hygiene would be first and foremost. Keep the meat cold. Have the children wash hands frequently. Maintain immaculately clean work surfaces. Otherwise, they love the process of making meatballs--squishing all the ingredients together in their fingers, rolling the mix into balls.

They especially love eating meatballs. I served them with a coq au vin sauce I just happened to have in the fridge (we called it "gravy"). And they gobbled up the fermented turnips, this after all kinds of moaning and groaning and face-making when we passed the bucket around. They do give off quite a distinctive stench, these fermented turnips, but the taste is oh so nutty and sweet, with a horseradish-like bite.

For the meatballs: In a mixing bowl, place 1/2-pound each of ground beef, ground pork and ground veal (or turkey). Add two beaten eggs; 1/4-cup diced onion, sauteed until lightly browned; 3 tablespoons chopped parsley; 1 1/2-teaspoons salt; 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce; 1/2 teaspoons mild paprika; zest from one lemon, finely chopped; 1 teaspoon lemon juice; and one thick slice rustic bread, soaked thoroughly in milk.

Using both hands, squish all of the ingredients together until well mixed. Form into 2-inch balls and brown in a skillet with butter or extra-virgin olive oil. Pour 5 cups beef broth into the skillet. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat, cover and simmer until meatballs are cooked through, about 12 minutes.

Use the broth to make a gravy. Serve the meatballs warm, with a spoonful of gravy over each and tangy, fermented sauerruben au naturel on the side.

Pickling Like Mad

I have a confession to make about last year's pickles.


I don't think they were that great. We made quite a large quantity for my "food appreciation" classes at the private elementary school where I teach here in the District of Columbia. The kids were wild for them and we served them at the parents' night dinner. Some of the parents even requested jars to take home.


The pickles were okay. But they were missing a certain zip. This year, I'm pleased to announce, we've got the zip.


These are fermented pickles, meaning they cure in a salt brine and when finished resemble those "kosher dills" you remember being served with your pastrami sandwich at the Jewish deli. I may be halfway over the learning curve because I've become rather adept at stopping the fermentation process at just that point when the pickles have absorbed the garlic and dill flavors and still retain the bright fresh color and the crunchy cucumber snap.


Some people call these "half-sours."


If you let the cukes ferment much longer, they turn a deep, dark green and become somewhat softer--not completely flaccid, mind you, but somewhat beyond snappy--more like the standard dill pickles you find in a jar at the supermarket. These would be "full-sours."


Not fermented enough and the pickles are missing the proper flavor and aren't cured all the way through--they taste more like salad.

Somehow, August doesn't feel like pickling season and with the temperatures this high, the fermentation process moves right along, more quickly than it might in the fall when things are cooler. But this is when the cucumbers are ripe for picking. You can't let them sit around and go bad, so into the brine they go.


At current temperatures, the pickles seem to reach the proper flavor and consistency for my taste somewhere between five days and a week in the brine. At this point, they need to be refrigerated to stop the bacterial action and arrest the fermentation process until you are ready to eat them.



(Remember the formula for making these pickles? Dissolve six tablespoons pickling or fine sea salt in one gallon of water. Add peeled cloves from two heads of garlic, a couple of dill plant seed heads if you have them, a fistful of leafy dill sprigs, another fist full of oak leaves and maybe a half-teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Place all this and the cucumbers in a heavy-gauge plastic bucket. Cover with a ceramic plate that fits just inside the bucket and weigh this down with a plastic container filled with water to keep the cucumbers completely submerged in the brine. Place the bucket in a cool, dark spot and check on the pickles after a few days. Skim away any mold that might form and watch the pickles carefully so that you stop the fermentation when they reach your desired doneness.)


I've made several buckets of pickles recently and yesterday was the designated day to put them away for storage. Even the cukes that had grown very large on the vine while we were on vacation pickled to a crispy, garlicky turn. I cut the cukes in half lengthwise, then cut these pieces in half and sliced them into spears to fit quart-sized plastic containers. Add a few garlic cloves, some dill stems and top off with brine. Then place the containers in the fridge.


I also saved a large container of brine, in case the pickles need to be topped off at some point in the future. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how long these pickles will keep in the refrigerator. I just don't have enough experience with them, and I'm not sure they won't be eaten well before they expire. But judging from the fermented sauerkraut I made last December, which remains delicious in the fridge to this day (note to self: eat more sauerkraut), these pickles should keep for a good long while.


I couldn't help munching on the pickles as I worked, they are that good. Pretty irresistible, in fact. I was pining for that pastami sandwich. I would have settled for tuna fish.

Some batches turned out better than others, meaning I just have to keep a closer eye on things next time. My cucumber plants are exhausted at this point. Fortunately, you can buy pickling cucumbers at the farmer's market or the Whole Foods and, unlike mine, they will be about the right size for canning, not the monsters I've been using. So I will be making some mean pickles with my "food appreciation" students this year.


Now, to find a recipe for that pastrami...

Uncle Moyshe's Fresh Pickles

The headline for today's post is a bit deceptive, in that I don't have an Uncle Moyshe. But I imagine if I did have an Uncle Moyshe and he made pickles, they would be very much like these.


Because these are not canned pickles, but pickles that ferment in a salt brine. These would be the kind of pickles you would find floating around in a big barrel in an old-fashioned Jewish delicatessen. Or maybe sidling up next to your hot pastrami sandwich.

Some of the cucumber vines we planted are beginning to bear fruit. I specifically planted pickling cucumbers because, to be honest, we're not huge fans of slicing cucumbers. I enjoy Swedish-style cucumbers, the ones sliced incredibly thin and dressed simply with salt or perhaps a cream sauce. Otherwise I eat most of my cucumbers in some form of pickle.


Another important reason for making pickles is the chance to re-visit Sandor Ellix Katz and his book Wild Fermentation. Opening Katz' book is like going home again, with all the unusual recipes for fermenting one kind of vegetable or another using simple home brews. I never feel more liberated as a cook, or more self-sufficient as a human, as when I am following one of Katz's recipes. Fermentation has a way of making a connection with our deepest roots as cooks and eaters.

Another advantage: fermentation involves no cooking that might heat up the kitchen on an already hot July afternoon.

I cheated a little because I really only had three cucumbers ready for pickling, it's still that early in the season. But I couldn't see letting them go to waste while we wait for more cucumbers to grow on the vine. So I just buzzed down to the local Whole Foods and bought some more pickling cucumbers to augment my own. It's a nice feature, Whole Foods selling pickling cucumbers. (Those are the ones with the little bumps all over, as opposed to the smooth slicing cucumbers.)

I had to adjust the standard pickling recipe, which calls for covering the cucumbers with a brine of salt and water. Instead of measuring the water for the brine, I laid the cucumbers in the bottom of my pickling bucket (a 2 1/2-gallon plastic bucket purchased from the corner paint store), then covered the cucumbers with water, then measured the water.

What I had was 3 quarts of water, which, when adjusted according to Katz's formula, called for 4 1/2 tablespoons of pickling salt. I mixed the salt with the water. To the bucket I added several small dill seed heads from the garden, along with a fistful of dill stems with bushy leaves and the peeled cloves from two heads of garlic and several oak leaves. Yes, that's correct--oak leaves gathered from a tree in front of the house. They, or the tannins the leaves contain, help crisp the pickles.

Finally, I added about 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes for a little heat, then covered the pickles with a small plate that just fits inside the pickling bucket. On top of the plate I placed a plastic storage container filled with water. This will keep the cucumbers submerged in the brine.

The way fermentation works, a progression of different bacteria will colonize the brine, eventually creating lactic acid in which beneficial bacteria will thrive while keeping spoiling kinds of creatures out.

The process can take anywhere from a week to a month, depending on temperature. The higher the temperature, the faster the fermentation. I prefer a slow, gentle fermentation. The good bacteria like things around 70 degrees, but it's not easy finding a 70-degree spot in our house, since we don't crank up our air conditioning that high, even when it's pushing 100 degrees in the District of Columbia, as it is now.

I covered the pickling bucket with a clean dish towel and placed it in the stairwell leading down to our garage. It's cooler down there.

With any luck, I won't forget to check on our pickles periodically. When they reach that perfect, puckery peak of pickleness, I will remove the bucket from the stairwell and place the pickles in the refrigerator where they will keep for a good long while.

Now we just have to figure out how to make our own pastrami...

Homemade Sauerkraut & Choucroute Garnie

I know I am not the only Washingtonian who heaves a sigh of relief when winter finally arrives south of the Mason-Dixon line. Summers here are notoriously muggy, besides which I grew up in Chicago, so I have a certain amount of ice water in my veins. Shirt sleeves in December just seem unnatural to me. There should be frost on the pumpkin at least by Thanksgiving. These kinds of traditions are fading because we no longer recognize the conventional seasons. Thanks to cheap fossil fuels (for how long?), we can now get virtually any kind of fruit or vegetable any time of year. It's just that I don't want to be eating tomato salad in January. I think eating "fresh" asparagus when there's snow on the ground is an abomination. No, when icicles are hanging from the gutters I want to be eating root vegetables (perhaps my rutabaga souffle, but that's another story). I want to be roasting beets, or cooking onion soup. Or, better still, simmering a pot of my own fermented sauerkraut. This time of year, we are trekking to the butcher's for all the fatty and smoked pieces of pork that become the protein component of an unctuous, scandalously calorie-rich batch of choucroute garnie--featuring, of course, the sauerkraut that has been aging ever so quietly in the back of my house since about two months ago.

Perhaps you have an older relation who remembers grandpa feeding a smelly old barrel of kraut in the basement. I use a five-gallon bucket from the paint store. I slice maybe 30 pounds of garden-variety cabbage, mix it with pickling salt, pack it into the bucket, cover it with a ceramic dinner plate and--voila--in matter of weeks, and courtesy of some friendly bacteria that happen to be living on the cabbage when you buy it at the store, your kraut has fermented into the briny, vegetable equivalent of caviar. Green gold. Brassica for the gods...

I know you're thinking that creating delectable sauerkraut must be more complicated than I am making out, and I swear it is not. No fancy chemicals, no elaborate formulae, no expensive equipment. You're probably also thinking, Fermentation? Isn't that how you make beer? Or wine? Well, yes. And cheese. And yogurt. Fermentation is really just a food preservation technique that doesn't involve cooking, or canning, or refrigeration (although you may want to refrigerate your sauerkraut once it reaches the desired state of ripeness, to slow down the fermentation process. But more about that anon.) What fermentation really is rot in progress. Bacteria or other micro-organisms are munching away on the food in question (grapes, hops, cabbage, milk) and decomposing it until it reaches the point where we humans want to eat it. Just about every culture has a taste for something rotten. Cheese and sauerkraut in Europe. Yogurt in Central Asia. Miso in Japan. Kimchi in Korea. Sourdough bread in San Francisco? Need I say more?

Sadly, most of the sauerkraut we consume these days is not alive, or even that tasty. It's been made in a factory, then pasteurized for safety reasons. Not only is the vibrant flavor of freshly-made sauerkraut missing, but the live bacterial cultures have been killed off. Some people attribute health benefits to those bacteria, similar to the healthful benefits of yogurt containing live cultures. At a store called Morse's in Waldoboro, ME, the parking lot is jammed on weekends with people seeking jugs of fresh broth from the sauerkraut that owners David Swetnam and Jacquelyn Sawyer make on site. My wife and I paid a visit three years ago while on vacation in Maine. Waldoboro is in the middle of a German settlement and Morse's has been making sauerkraut since 1918. It's not a huge operation, but one of the few in the country that sells and ships fresh sauerkraut with live cultures. (Check their website at http://www.morsessauerkraut.com/. They operate a small restaurant on the premises and a large deli department with a hefty selection of sausages, cheeses, packaged goods.) Watching David Swetnam run locally grown cabbage through his shredding machine, then salting big vats to begin the fermentation process, convinced me this was something I should be doing at home.

It does help to have a guide. And mine continues to be a book called Wild Fermentation by one Sandor Ellix Katz. Katz gives instructions for fermenting all kinds of foods, from yogurt to Andean corn-chewed beer. As Katz explains, the fermentation of sauerkraut starts with bacteria that are already present on the cabbage--hence wild--but really involves a succession of micro-organisms, a kind of tag-team effort that keeps good bacteria working on the cabbage in its brine, and keeps harmful pathogens out. In the beginning, Coliform bacteria take the lead. They produce an acid that is more hospitable to Leuconostic bacteria. As the brine solution becomes even more acidic, a third team member--Lactobacillus--assumes control. The good new is, you don't have to be concerned with any of this. As long as you season the cabbage with a more or less correct amount of salt at the beginning, and keep the cabbage submerged in its brine (remember I mentioned a ceramic dinner plate?), everything will be fine. At the elementary school where I teach "food appreciation," I recently made sauerkraut with kids as young as four. To illustrate the process, I made signs that hung around their necks indicating the three different kinds of bacteria. We made a circle representing the interior of the bucket. Then we had a second group of kids representing harmful pathogens trying to get inside the bucket, but being deterred, of course, by our tag-team of good bacteria. I think if four- and five-year-olds can make sauerkraut, it's a good bet you can, too.

For a small batch of sauerkraut, you'll need either a ceramic crock made specifically for this purpose (available on-line) or a heavy-duty plastic bucket. All authorities advise using a "food-grade" plastic bucket, meaning something that wont degrade or leach chemicals into your brine. I bought mine at the paint store. Chop five pounds of cabbage into shreds. Mix with three tablespoons fine sea salt, or pickling salt--mainly, a salt that has no chemical additives. If using a ceramic crock, load it according the manufacturer's instructions. If using a plastic bucket, pack the cabbage into the bucket very firmly. I lean on it with a clenched fist, a handful of cabbage at a time. When all of the cabbage has been tightly packed, cover the bucket with a clean dish towel. Check the bucket the following day. The salt should have drawn enough liquid out of the cabbage to create a brine at least to the top of the cabbage. Here's where you take a heavy ceramic plate that just fits inside the bucket (or a piece of non-resinous wood, such as ash, cut into a circle), press the plate down firmly until the brine flows over the top of the plate. Now you need to weigh the plate down. I use an eight-cup plastic container filled with water. You can also use a jug filled with water. If for some reason there is not enough brine in the bucket, add some water. Cover the bucket with the dish towel and store in a cool, dark place.

The bacteria seem to like a temperature around 68 degrees. Warmer, and they will make sauerkraut faster. Cooler, and they slow down. Check the bucket periodically. If you see mold or slime forming, not to worry. Just remove the plate, clean it off, wipe down the edges of the bucket, and resume fermentation. Don't be afraid to taste the brine or the kraut. It's done when it reaches your estimation of perfect sauerkraut.

Now, what to do with all that sauerkraut? Well, you can eat it as is. You will be getting the benefit of all those bacteria we discussed earlier. Or you can cook the sauerkraut as a side dish, or as the basis for a magnificent choucroute garnie. My method of cooking kraut is as follows:

2 tablespoons bacon grease or canola oil

1 large onion, peeled and sliced thinly lengthwise

1 Granny Smith apple, peeled and roughly grated

2 large cloves garlic, smashed then chopped fine

6 cups fresh sauerkraut

8 juniper berries, crushes

2 teaspoons caraway seeds

In a heavy pot or Dutch oven heat the bacon grease or oil over high heat until it just begins to smoke. Add onion and lower heat to medium low. Stir in apple and cook until onion is soft, about 8 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook about 1 minute longer. Add sauerkraut. Stir in juniper berries and caraway seeds. Cover pot and cook gently over low heat for about 1 hour, or until the sauerkraut has turned a golden color and is very tender.

For a real feast, and to show off your sauerkraut making skills, I suggest a choucroute garnie. This is French for "sauerkraut with a whole lot of pig." Basically you want to find a butcher with an array for pork products. I look for such delectables as streak-o'-lean, smoked ham hock, smoked pork chops, "bacon ends" (big chunks of trimmings from slab bacon), a good garlic sausage such as Kielbasa, and possibly some bratwurst, depending on how hungry you and your guests are.

To start, saute about three thick slices of streak-o'-lean in the bottom of a big, heavy pot or Dutch oven until the meat begins to brown and give up some of its fat. Remove the meat and add some bacon grease or canola oil as needed to saute the onion, apple and garlic as in the previous recipe. Add the sauerkraut, the juniper berries, the caraway seeds, then return the slices of streak-o'-lean along with a ham hock and up to a pound of bacon ends. Nestle the meat into the sauerkraut. Cover the pot and braise over low heat for about an hour, or until the bacon pieces are very tender. Meanwhile, brown the sausages over high heat. Add those and a couple of smoked pork chops to the pot, stirring them gently into the sauerkraut, and cook another half-hour.

Turn the hot sauerkraut , meat and sausages out onto a big serving platter for your guests to admire. Serve with boiled potatoes tossed with butter and chopped parsley and some root vegetables (such as carrots, rutabaga, parsnips) sliced and roasted with some extra-virgin olive oil. Crack a couple of bottles of an Alsatian Riesling or Pinot blanc. Put a hearty mustard on the table, along with a basket of sliced country-style bread.