Pickling Party, or What I Did on My Summer Vacation

dill pickles with garlic; tomato sauce; spicy peach jam

Last fall, I laid plans for a four-week vacation this summer. We get generous leave benefits where I work. We also have a sabbatical program, but I’m still a few years away from qualifying for my second one; however, I realized at some point that I could use my accumulated personal leave to get a nice long break without waiting until 2014. So I made the appropriate requests and got approval and got the time onto the calendars. I had second thoughts about the wisdom of this plan back in April, when I was overloaded with projects at work and busy with volunteering and other obligations outside the office, and no days off in sight. But I held fast, and soon the glorious day arrived: July 18, my first weekday of liberty.

That’s right: This is my fourth week of vacation. I haven’t been blogging during that time because I’ve been more focused on a different writing project. I was hoping I’d finish a solid draft of that by this Friday, which admittedly was always an unrealistic goal; however, unrealistic goals are useful motivators sometimes, and I have a much better framework in place for the project itself now. I’m better prepared to make regular progress once I’m back at work and have a solid draft done in the next few months. End of September, perhaps? Just the right end of unrealistic to shoot for, I think.

This week, however, I’ve turned my attention to food. You may remember back in July, Shauna James Ahern of Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef collaborated with friends to organize a virtual pie party. It was a smashing success: thousands of people made pies and posted pictures and comments on Facebook, on Twitter, on blogs. So Shauna and her friends thought a new party was in order, and today is Pickling Party day.

I’ve made pickles before. Back in Portland it was simple: Get some jars, get some goodies from the farmers’ market, check your recipes, do lots of cleaning, boil a lot of water, and ta-da! It’s some work but nothing complicated. In New York it’s similar, but with one twist: finding canning jars at a reasonable price. New York is an expensive place to live, and most of its retailers are serving people who don’t have a lot of space and so aren’t buying in bulk. In Portland I could walk into just about any hardware store and find 12-jar cases of pints or quarts for around $10; in New York you can buy single jars for $1.75 apiece, or more. The first year we were here, one hardware store a few blocks away from my home attempted to sell me a box of pints for $30. Twelve jars. I walked out in a huff.

The growth of the whole and homemade foods movement has prompted more New York retailers to stock cases instead of singles. However, those cases are still $16 and $17, reflecting the higher cost of doing business here. And those retailers are far away from me, leaving the challenge of getting a heavy load of glass jars home on the subway without breakage or other disaster. I’d looked for jars on Amazon and other online outlets, but the savings in per-case charges were always more than offset by shipping fees for heavy glass. However, I kept poking around in forums and question threads, and finally found a pointer to FreshPreserving.com, the official online distributor for Ball jars. I did the math: even with shipping charges, the cases cost less than they would in the Brooklyn or Manhattan stores. And they came fast, via overnight shipping (after a day or two for the order to be processed).

Now I was ready to hit the Greenmarket. As with any big project, I started by dreaming big. How many kinds of pickles could I make? Maybe I could do several jams, since I might as well do other canning while I had the water boiling. Hey, this could be the year I make tomato sauce! What about chutneys and relishes? A leisurely browse through my main canning cookbook and some websites filled my mind with visions of pickled brussels sprouts, ginger jam, pickled garlic, habanero jelly. Then I let reality creep back in. There are only so many hours in a day and only so many jars in a dozen. Brussels sprouts aren’t in yet; those may fill a Sunday this September but won’t do for the August pickling party. Berries are kind of expensive here, even at the Greenmarket; New York is not the berry wonderland that the Northwest is. And to me pickles start and end with cucumber: crisp, dilly, with a hint of garlic and maybe a hot-pepper bite.

I decided to do three categories of canning: pickles, the bulk of the effort; tomato sauce, my first foray into preserving the Greenmarket’s red jewels for cold weather; and peach jam, an easy old standby. (I had to remind myself that I don’t actually eat nearly as much jam as all that, not enough to stock up jars and jars of the stuff.) I hit the market on Monday with my rolling cart and a list in my mind. I trundled away some time later sweaty, my foot aching (I’m recovering from plantar fasciitis), and laden with fresh produce destined for the jar, the freezer or that night’s dinner. Once home, I set aside the things for the next day’s work, used some of the tomatoes for a pasta dish for dinner, did some necessary housecleaning, and took a few minutes to start macerating fruit and herbs for soda syrup (another Gluten Free Girl offering; I followed her recipe to make cherry-basil, and followed the basic proportions to make peach-mint).  Then I rested for the evening, knowing I’d be busy the next day.

And so I was. Once I’d finished breakfast and caught up with my Facebook Scrabble games, I got to work. I started by getting the soda syrups out of the way, pureeing the macerated fruit and herbs and then filtering out the solids. Then I got the leftover dishes done and put away, dug out the few odd leftover canning jars and lids, and figured out my game plan. The jam and the sauce would require cooking before canning, so I’d get started on those. I boiled water so I could dunk scored peaches and tomatoes to peel them; chopped the peaches and got them cooking with sugar, lemon juice, nutmeg and cinnamon; chopped the tomatoes and set them aside until I had a burner free for the tomato sauce; and started washing canning jars while the jam cooked.

I pulled out my tall stock pot — that would be my hot-water-bath canner, tall enough to accommodate the quart jars. I washed away the dust, found the tidy round rack that goes in the bottom, poured in water, and started it heating on a back burner. I pulled out my pressure cooker, which is essentially an enormous pot since I don’t have a complete pressure gauge for it and so don’t feel comfortable using it for canning. That would be my pot for sterilizing the jars. I filled it with water and started that boiling as well. I pulled out a smaller saucepan to keep hot but not boiling for the lids.

While the jam cooked, I washed and sterilized jars, laid out towels on the counters, and chopped onions and garlic for the tomato sauce. When the jam had hit its temperature target I used a canning funnel to ladle it into jars, carefully laid on the clean lids with tongs, tightened up the rings, and lowered the jars into the hot-water bath. Then it was time to start the tomato sauce: I sauteed onions, garlic and herbs in olive oil, added the chopped tomatoes and their bright-red liquid, and let the works simmer for about half an hour. While those were in process I moved now-sealed jam jars aside to cool, washed and sterilized more jars, and started to pull together my pickling materials.

I love dill pickles in nearly any form, so I decided to do several, and I washed and sorted my cucumbers accordingly. A medium-sized bowl of little cucumbers to pickle whole. Two bowls of spears, some thicker and some fatter. A bowl of nice round chips. (I have a crinkle-cutter, but I opted for smooth slices this year for a cleaner look.) I mixed up a pickling spice dominated by peppercorns, mustard seed and cumin seeds. I filled a small bowl with promising-looking dried chiles. I peeled clove after clove of fresh garlic. I trimmed the largest stalks out of the dill, leaving individual tufts of the feathery fronds. And when the tomato sauce was done and in jars, I used that burner to prepare my brine: a ratio of 1 cup vinegar to 1 cup water to 1 tablespoon of plain salt.

I filled my jars: whole pickles in the widest-mouth jars I had, spears in the quarts or pints as their length allowed. I dropped in garlic, spice, dill. Some jars got chiles. The individual jars are going to have subtle variations in flavor; the spice mixture didn’t want to stay uniform, and some jars have more mustard seed while others have more peppercorn. That’s OK. I also added a sprinkle of alum powder, which I was advised to do years ago by a friend who knows a lot more about pickling than I do; I’m not sure exactly what it does but my pickles have always been good so it can’t hurt.

Finally it was time to add brine. I had to keep mixing more, but it doesn’t take long for the salt to dissolve and the mixture to reach a boil again, and my batches of brine kept pace with my batches of jars going into and out of the hot-water bath. While pickles sealed and jars sat waiting their turn, I set aside the jars I hadn’t used, washed the pots and utensils, and got the rest of the kitchen in order. At about 6 pm I was pulling out the last 7 jars of pickles; I’d managed to produce 6 quarts and 14 pints, along with the 5 pints of tomato sauce and 3 1/2 pints of jam. I was ready for a shower and a drink.

I’m looking forward to eating pickles. Spears alongside a salad. Slices in a sandwich. Little whole pickles crunched down in two or three bites.