Pickled Stems

on May 16 in food, garden, good for the body, good for the soul tagged kitchen experiments, pickled stems, Sunday, vinegar by Leeann

Just after the holidays this year I decided to expand my pickling repertoire outside of your standard cukes. After realizing that we had been eating a good deal of swiss chard and other dark leafy greens and subsequently sending a lot of stems to the compost bin, I wanted to pickle the stems instead. My first batch involved this recipe, which I found after putting “pickled chard stems” into google. I used mostly chard stems, and some collard stems. The result was sweet, spicy, and surprisingly heavy on the clove, which I didn’t mind but D could not deal with. He said it reminded him of the brief period of time he smoked clove cigarettes (ah, art school).

So this time, I went with a slightly different mix of spices and ingredients. For starters, I used chard stems, kale stems, and some asparagus. Unlike most recipes, I blanched them first in salted water with a few bay leaves because the kale in particular would be too tough (the collard stems last time were tasty, but not as easy to eat). I stuck the pieces in a cold water bath after a few minutes at a boil to stop the cooking.

While the vinegar and spice mixture was coming to a boil (recipe below), I loaded the jars with stems and sliced onion.

Once the mixture came to a boil, I funneled it into the jars and once they cooled, into the fridge they went!

Refrigerator pickles are ready to eat after a few days and can survive a good long while. The key to keeping them is to always use clean utensils when getting pickles out (no fingers, please), and make sure they get back into the fridge when you’re done!

Pickling mix recipe:

This was used with stems from 2 bunches of chard, 1 bunch of kale, 1 large onion, and a small number of asparagus pieces.

3 Cups vinegar (I used half white, half cider vinegar. Rice wine vinegar would have been my first choice, but a trip to the store wasn’t in the books this morning.)

1 Cup water

3/4 C sugar

3 1/2 Tbsp salt (kosher, pickling, etc. NO table salt)

a heavy pinch each of coriander seeds, fennel seeds, allspice berries, peppercorns, and a few bay leaves (about 1 per jar), a few pieces of dried chili