Alien Ingredient #7: Pickled Eggplant

Yeah, OK, I am a sucker for Asian condiments. I've tried gazillions and yet there are gazillions more to try. So when I saw these eggplants in the refrigerator case at the market, they just had to come back to the restaurant with me. I guess I chose them because of all the pickles I have eaten, none have ever been eggplant. It just never occurred to me that eggplants were pickled. And now I wonder why not, given that I pickle all manner of things including peppers, onions, green tomatoes, green beans, and okra.

But looking further into it, I see that pickled eggplants are common all over Asia. So now I feel kind of stupid, but then that was the point of this whole "alien ingredient" series: to learn, to play, to have fun. And these pickles are fun, too!

The eggplants are of a cultivar that I do not recognize, looking like tiny pickled green tomatoes. I am used to the Thai zebra-striped green eggplants, but these appear to have no stripes. In any case, the smallest are pickled whole while the largest appear to be quartered, with many simpled halved. They are very crunchy, perhaps just a tad too crunchy (quoth Alex, "I wish these were a little softer") and the brine is very aggressive in a salty industrial vinegar kind of way. I wish they had used a higher quality vinegar and less salt. The red chile is fairly mild as red chile goes. Of course, I am a chile head of the first order, so don't trust my judgement!


I think Alex summed it up fairly well: "Sort of like eggplant kimchee."

I am going to try these in two cooked applications. I think that they would be pretty damned tasty in a curry and tossed into Thai fried rice.

Vote: these are fun and addictive to munch on. We'd like to try putting up our own this summer because we know we can do a better job.

Alien Ingredient #1: Dwarf Truffle Peaches

Dwarf truffle peaches. The name was enough to get me to order a jar of these sight unseen. I mean seriously WTF do peaches, truffles, and dwarves have to do with each other?

These come from Italy where they pickle the immature green fruit that they thin to reduce the fruit load on the trees so as to increase the size and flavor of the remaining peaches and/or so as not to overload the branches to the point where they might snap.* After pickling, they are packed in a truffle oil. This jar contains a full kilogram of product and a good liter of nice tasting truffle oil. In fact, the biggest win of this product may be using the truffle oil to flavor dishes long after the peaches are gone. I can already imagine browning spätzle in it or dressing green beans in it.

[*The original text, quoted from manufacturer's web site read: "any unripe tiny green peaches off the trees at the end of the season". There aren't unripe green peaches on trees at the end of the season.]

The peaches are the size of very large olives and are very crisp all the way through. The pit is undeveloped as you can see in the photo, so the whole thing is edible. The pickle cure is a bit vinegary but also a bit sweet. The peaches themselves are very crispy crunchy in a pleasant way. You wouldn't want to eat more than a couple of them (nor most other pickles) but they will make neat garnishes for charcuterie plates and would definitely make quite the upscale martini garnish.

You gotta love the label that looks like it was cooked up on somebody's home computer and printed on his ink jet printer. How sketchy!

Vote: pretty cool product packed in an oil that may be more useful than the product itself. We like these cute little guys.

Pickles

For our charcuterie plates, speaking of which note-to-self: must make lamb terrine this morning, various pickles: Kirby cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, West Indian gherkins, poona kheera cucumbers, carrots, dill, cayennes, and garlic.



I doubt you can see it in the photo, but you should note the weight that I'm using to hold the cucumbers under the brine. It's a seal top bag full of brine and I've squeezed all the air out of it.

Pickles on the Hoof

I'm always making some kind of pickles (see Dill Pickles and Zanahorias en Escabeche) to accompany the charcuterie that I make in house and when I ran across this cornucopia this morning at the market, I knew I had to start a new batch of dill pickles today.

At the top of the photo, the small round yellow cucumbers are called Lemon Cucumbers and just below that are the standard European/Burpless/English cucumbers we call Eurocukes. Below and to the right, the pale green ones are Armenian cucumbers, which I have read do not make good pickles: we shall see. At the bottom left are typical small pickling cucumbers that the vendor called Tiny Toms. These are about half the size of a typical Kirby pickling cucumber.

We'll know how this batch of pickles turns out in a couple of weeks.

Zanahorias en Escabeche

I've been fond of pickles my entire life. My mother, her mother, her mother, my aunts, all the women in my family, were accomplished pickle makers. When I was growing up, making pickles was what you did to put the summer bounty by for the winter.

I remember dipping peaches in a gigantic pot of boiling water in the already steamy August kitchen and peeling them until I was sick of them. They'd be loaded into canning jars, topped off with a heavily spiced syrup, and processed to seal the jars, adding yet more steam to the kitchen. Likewise for all manner of other things: figs in lemon syrup, hundreds and hundreds of jars of dill pickles, lime (sweet) pickles, okra, pepper relish, green beans, tomatoes and tomato juice, beets, and so forth and so on. Hardly anyone puts things by any longer, but I still remember the hot and sweaty labor with some fondness and a lot of nostalgia.

I still like to put up things for my customers; well, if the truth be told, it's probably for me, to reconnect me to the generations of my family who have done so. I try not to dwell on the idea that I will probably be the last of my family and the last generation to do so. My children seem to have little interest in the kitchen.

Last August, I put up a bushel of pickled peaches using my mother's recipe, which was certainly her mother's and her mother's before her. The peaches were outstanding and we managed to eke them out with roasted duck breast into the new year. I often make quick cucumber pickles for same day use. I put up half a bushel of lemons just recently to use in my tagines, something that the women in my family might look askance at. I can just hear the hens now, "Whoever heard of pickled lemons?" But they'd be proud that I am carrying the torch, no matter that it is foreordained to sputter out in the not terribly distant future.

My latest endeavor involves a style of pickle that I first encountered when I moved to Texas in my early 20s. As I have written previously, I was pretty desperately poor in those days, and when I could eat out, it was alongside the Mexican laborers in the local tacqueria/dive. Señora would always bring a dish of pickled jalapeños to the table with the beans and tortillas or menudo (tripe, if I was feeling particularly flush) and tortillas. And I always counted myself fortunate if I found some sliced carrots and onions in the jalapeños. I came to love the spicy carrots in red wine or cider vinegar brine.

I love them so much that this time, I dispensed altogether with the jalapeños and just pickled the carrots. I also kept the spice level down so that I could share them with my customers. I wonder if they will sense the history behind these carrots?

Preserved Lemons

Here at One Block West Restaurant, we use a lot of preserved lemons, mostly in tagines of lamb or chicken. Whenever I've mentioned them in my recipes and in the monthly newsletter, customers have always been curious what preserved lemons are and where they can buy them.

As for what they are, preserved lemons are basically pickled lemons, lemons that have been brined, in the same way that you would make dill pickles, without the dill, naturally. This photo shows from left to right a fresh lemon, a lemon that has been curing for about two weeks, and a lemon from a batch I made about a year ago. Notice that the lemon that is still curing is starting to go soft, but it is not quite soft enough to eat. And that the lemon I've had in the cooler for months has lost its color, which is expected.

As for where to buy them, I don't know of any place. Sure, they're available to the trade in 10 kilo buckets, but even I don't need that many preserved lemons at the restaurant and you surely don't. Fortunately, preserved lemons are trivial to make and you should try it. I don't see how you can screw it up.

You'll need lemons to preserve and extra to squeeze for lemon juice to top off the container, a non-corrosive (plastic or ceramic, for example) container, something to weight the lemons down and keep them under the surface of the brine (such as a couple of plates), and salt (we use kosher salt).

To begin, dip the lemons to be preserved in boiling water for a few seconds, mainly to dissolve any wax coating on them. Wipe them to get all the wax off and cut off the stem. Then, as in this photo, slice in half vertically, leaving the two halves attached at the stem end. (How you slice the lemon is immaterial. The entire point of the exercise is to let you pack the lemon with salt. This is how I slice the lemon. Do what feels right to you.)

Then, I rotate the lemon ninety degrees around its vertical axis and slice it again, this time from bloom end to stem end, leaving the halves attached at the bloom end and slicing through the stem end. I do this simply because having the lemon quarters attached at both ends seems to keep the lemons whole longer, not that this is in any way important.

In the past, when I have quartered lemons, leaving them intact only at the stem end, I have noticed that they tend to fall apart more frequently as they age in the brine. Again, it doesn't matter, mainly because you will most likely dice the rind before cooking with it. A pickled lemon is a pickled lemon no matter what shape it's in or how you slice it.

This final photo shows a lemon ready to be packed with salt. Put a layer, say a centimeter or less, of salt in the bottom of your non-corrosive container. Pack each lemon full of salt and place in the container. Add any herbs or spices you want. (I always throw in a cinnamon stick and some fresh thyme. Why? I dunno.) Then top off the container with lemon juice (I save the brine from one batch to use with the next batch, boiling it between uses) and place a couple of plates on top of the lemons to keep them fully submerged beneath the brine.

At this point, I put the lemons on the counter and check them once a week. They take four to six weeks for the rinds to soften to where I like them. At this point, I transfer the container to the fridge and start to use the lemons.

You can use the whole lemon, but I generally just dice the rind for my tagines, couscous and other dishes. The reason for this is that my lemons are generally full of seeds and it is a nightmare to remove them and still have any flesh left intact to dice. So I peel the rind off the flesh and pitch the flesh.