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Piccalilli

My recipe here salts the veg' over-night, drains, boils for 10 minutes in most of the vinegar, then adds the other ingredients stirred into the remainder of the vinegar, then boils for another 10 minutes. That's it. VERY quick.

Far less faff than I remembered......................... certainly quicker than fruit/sugar preserves.

The recipe uses a little dry ginger, which I am unsure about............... I will give the spices some thought...........allspice? (makes cracking good pickled pears with star anise and cloves)
 
Yes, salt over night, rinse and drain. Cook sauce then stir in veg, switch off and jar. That’s as much cooking as the veg needs IMHO if you like a crisp bite (the veg will soften slightly in the jar over time).
 
P.s. as to jars, those large roasted and pickled red capsicums at Lidl make a bloody fine bruschetta and the large jars are perfect for home pickling after they’ve been through the dishwasher.
 
re mjw's post - DO treat such jars as you would making Marmalade - after wash, immediately before use - pre-heat in oven; get jars above 60degC min, then whatever biological sources of potential corruption left, is dead, and the points made by @stevec67 re: preservation, reinforced in this post; which is always why horrors like 'Twinkys' and anything from McDonalds, will outlast us, just to feed cockroaches :/

At least that's how my fam makes marmalade, it lasts years - but only if well-hidden ;)
 
Hadn’t had it in decades until the wife of a friends cousin kindly gave me a bottle of her home made version last year. Wonderful.
 
Vinny said:
The recipe uses a little dry ginger, which I am unsure about............... I will give the spices some thought...........allspice? (makes cracking good pickled pears with star anise and cloves)
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Interesting, I must give this a try.

I suspect I'd start close to home - say, some black peppercorns* and some mustardseed, freshly cracked in a mortar& pestle.


*My utter fave, why yes I am a local - Bart's Bristol Five-Blend.
Widely available off the shelf locally; the rest of you will have to go source some. An aromatic wonder, for all the reasons/seasons you'd want to use fresh ground black pepper.
 
Vinny said:
Means dry earth-loving/lover of dryness, not sugar. Xerophytes generally refers to plants such as cacti.

Sucrophileophile?
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In food xerophilic is usually synonymous with sugar, so that's what I'd taken it to mean but as you say "xero" is Greek for " dry ". In practice dry foods are generally sugary rather than dry as such. Jams and pickles such as we're discussing here are a case in point. They are dry as such, indeed they're about 30% water, more for pickles. If you're looking for a word meaning strictly sugar-loving I'd go with "saccharophilic" . There are a few obscure microbes with names like "Xx saccharophila "
 
2lb of mixed veg' in a pint of vinegar is just coming back to heat........................

It will obviously need a few weks to do its thing in jars, but the sauce tastes rather good, maybe a little sweet. 4 oz of sugar in this, and I added a small amount of ground allspice. It has a hint of "German"/hot-dog mustard. Spices otherwise just turmeric, mustard and ginger. No chilli.

If it works out well, I'll post the actual recipe.
 
Sounds good, @Vinny. I think you’re right to resist chilli. After all, the point is also to be able to taste those comparatively bland vegetables, albeit sauced.
 
My mum makes great piccalilli. When I go to see her I always pop into the garage to take a couple of jars. Her recipe has a very sharp taste, no real hint of sweetness.

I'll ask her for the recipe :)
 
We have such an abundance of beans and courgettes so I did double the Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe i.e. 2kg of veg.

 
Near enough 3 weeks maturing - I could not resist a taste.

The actual flavour is pretty good, but BOY is it tart.
My recipe uses 4oz sugar to 2lb veg' - a rough calculation gives around 8% sugar in the jars.

Searching online, amongst common brands, easily available in most supermarkets, Branston seems to be a commonly accepted alternative. Which I would agree with - it is very similar. The analysis on the jar is 22% sugar and the vast majority of that must come from added sugar - there'll not be much in the veg'.

I may add a "load" of sugar to one jar to see what that produces, trying to get around 20%.

Branstone and Haywards have been owned by the same parent company for a long while - Premier Foods until around 10 years ago, when they were sold to a Japanese compnay - Mizkan.

How is everyone else doing? Any tasting as yet?
 
Haven’t tasted yet. Nearly opened it on the second day to complement a terrine but I found some pickled cornichons and onions to use in stead.

Off-topic but we’ve had such a glut of ripe tomatoes, as have the neighbours, that we can’t give them away nor eat them all so I’ve been making red tomato and chilli chutney. I can post a recipe here if there’s any interest.
 
  • 1.8kg ripe tomatoes, blanched in boiling water and peeled
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 6 mild red chillies, deseeded and chopped
  • 450g caster sugar
  • 1 tbsp salt
  • 300ml malt vinegar
Halve and chop the peeled tomatoes. Put in a large pan with all their juices and the rest of the ingredients except the vinegar, then bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Simmer for 1½ hours, then add the vinegar and bring back to the boil. Cook for 15-20 minutes, stirring often, until the mixture is thick and pulpy and you can see the base of the pan when you draw a spoon through it.

n.b. it says blanch and peel but who's got time for that? (Also, Gordon Ramsay says the skins carry a lot of flavour). On this occasion I used 'cherry' size so didn't even cut them but you need a splash of water to stop them catching at stage one.
I also use cider rather than malt vinegar. We have a pal who eats this by the spoon but he can't tolerate gluten.
 
I wouldn’t know. It’s a borrowed recipe and I’ve always used cider or wine vinegars because Keith (our friend) is a coeliac
 
gintonic said:
I am intrigued by the use of malt vinegar - I find it a bit harsh
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Any recipe for pickles/chutneys in the UK, of any real age, will say malt vinegar, or just vinegar, as anything else has been haute cuisine until moderately recent years.

All vinegars are the same to huge degree - acetic (ethanoic) acid in water. What varies is the level of acid and what other gubbins is in there. To preserve anything, there has to be a certain level of acidity - pH, but as acetic acid is weak, not much of the total present contributes to lowering the pH, which also means that if acid is lost by evporation, pH doesn't change much, if at all, within certain bounds. For the same reason, pH of various vinegars will be very similar, irrespective of how much acid they contain.
 
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