3. Good Organic Gardening - May-June 2016 AvxHome.in

Pickles | FERMENTING & PICKLING
Shelf preservation
An overview of the art and history
of pickling fruits and vegetables
Words Chris Stafford
People have been pickling all manner
of foods for centuries, originally to
preserve them out of season and, later,
purely for the taste.
The practice is thought to have begun in
India 4000 years ago and by the end of the
Roman Empire had spread all over Europe.
Today, the Italians have their colourful
Mason jars
These classic preserving jars get
their name from Philadelphia tinsmith
John Landis Mason, who invented and
patented this style of jar in 1858. Their
lids allow easy sterilisation and provide
a hermetic seal for their contents. There
are many other types of preserving jars
that also have airtight seals.
Making whey
Line a colander with cheesecloth
and stand it inside a bowl or jug.
Pour 1L of plain yoghurt, kefir or other
fermented dairy into the cheesecloth.
Tie up the ends.
Let the whey drip out for 24 hours.
Store in an airtight, clean jar in
the fridge where it will keep for
several weeks.
Make labna with the firm yoghurt left
in the cheesecloth by rolling it into
balls and storing in light olive oil.
giardiniera of pickled onion, celery, zucchini,
carrot and cauliflower, while in northern Europe,
it’s herring and rollmops.
Appropriately, Amerigo Vespucci, the man
who gave his name to America — home of the
dill pickle — was a pickle merchant in Seville,
Spain. Before he went from marinades to
mariner and set sail for the New World, he
provisioned ships with preserved meat and
veg. A century and a half later, what we now
call Manhattan was home to a huge Dutch
pickle industry.
The word “pickle” actually comes from
the Dutch pekel, meaning brine, just one
of the agents commonly used in pickling
(others include salt, vinegar, whey and oils).
What people had discovered, long before the
invention of canning, was how to preserve food
through the process of lacto-fermentation.
Napoleon, who had a large army to feed,
kick-started the commercial pickling industry
when he offered a cash prize to anyone who
could safely preserve food in bulk. The prize
was claimed in 1810 by a confectioner named
Nicolas Appert who’d figured out if you
expelled air from a food container and boiled it,
the food didn’t spoil.
It would be another 50 years before Louis
Pasteur explained what was happening:
when you make the bottle airtight, no microorganisms
can enter; once you boil it, any microorganisms
already there are killed.
At first, commercial pickling was a labourintensive,
expensive business until industrialists
developed methods to do the job on a large
scale. The trouble is, processes such as hightemperature
pasteurisation or refrigeration kill
the beneficial bacteria in the food and reduce its
shelf life. In other words, a typical food industry
trade-off of nutrition for convenience.
To pickle and preserve fruits and vegies at
home, you don’t have to work on an industrial
scale. They can be made in the kitchen with
just a few wide-mouthed, sealable Mason jars or
similar and a wooden pounder. Use homemade
whey (see box) rather than commercial whey
for best results, especially with fruit. Whey
supplies the lactobacilli, without which pickles,
however tasty, don’t have the same nutritional
value. If you don’t have whey, add an extra
tablespoon of salt.
Some of these ingredients will be available
now from your garden, but you may have to buy
others that your local climate doesn’t support
growing right now.
A word about safety: When properly
fermenting pickles with a live culture such as
whey, it’s not necessary to sterilise jars but they
should be perfectly clean. Putting them and
their lids through a dishwasher cycle will do the
job well, but if you are more comfortable using
sterilised jars, by all means do so.
Good Organic Gardening | 75