Sweet picklin’

There’s something very primal and satisfying about preserving food that you’ve grown yourself. Crazily so. It must be somewhere buried deep in RNA, and it seems to be triggered by the first wisps of autumn or the smell of woodsmoke.

The sweet days of summer are still with us but I can already sense the onset of autumn with my harvests.

Even though there were just a few handfuls of shallots and onions from the croft that could be used it somehow felt important to mark this, our first ever crop, by preserving them.

I’ve been pickling onions for years, but have never really settled on a recipe that I love. This year, watching the storm roll in across the mountains of the mainland from the comfort of the caravan, I browsed through the few preserving books that I have here and created a blend of spices that I think may work well for us.

Pickling is a bit of a time consuming exercise at times. The onions have to be harvested, dried off, then peeled and trimmed.

Salting them is supposed to keep them crisp once preserved, so into a bowl with lots of coarse sea salt overnight they went. Nobody wants soggy pickles .

This morning they were rinsed and dried ready for next stage.

The vinegar that I’ve used is white wine vinegar rather than the usual malt vinegar that seems to be traditional in UK kitchens. It has a 6% acidity count, slightly higher than malt or distilled vinegar. It’s been sweetened with sugar and spiced with black peppercorns, coriander seeds, mustard seeds, chilli flakes and bay leaves.

All my kilner and preserving jars are still in storage so I’ve had to make do with sterilised, recycled jars. They seem to have worked well.

A kind neighbour has offered me ridge cucumbers to pickle and I’m scheduled to pick them up next week. I’ve kept some dill and dill flowers back ready for this moment…

May you savour the remaining sweet days of summer, and sweet picklin’ to you all.