>>3568

save up some coffee jars/jam jars etc or if you want to be fancy buy some of those ones as in pic

Sterilise with boiling water

put in stuff you want pickled, add vinegar, either white or malt depending on desired taste. Make sure all the stuff is under the vinegar.

Some things will benefit from being left in brine for 24 hours... the salty water gives a concentration gradient so that there is osmosis from your veggies - they dry out a bit so they don't end up slushy after pickling.

Add other stuff too as you fill like pickling spices (available most places) cloves, various colours of peppercorns, dried chilli (whole for preference but flaked are OK)

Piece of greaseproof paper over the top if using normal jars and then screw the lid over that.

Sticky label with the date (important if you're doing this every few weeks so you get the rotation right)

Leave in a cool dark place for as long as you can manage without eating them - a month at least.

>>3569
Good advice. Pay particular attention to:
>Sterilise with boiling water

Vinegar does a good job of killing nasties, but it can still get rank if you're too sloppy with cleanliness.

I've done some pickled garlic (garlic cloves whole with skin, pickling spice, malt vinegar, a whole fresh chilli with slits cut into it's skin and a a few sprigs of fresh thyme) which turned out OK. Part of the problem may have been that the garlic wasn't 100% fresh when it went in (some cloves showed the first signs of green shoots).

Another one which is a regular now is pickled mushrooms. Same recipe as above, small mushrooms went in whole, medium ones were halved and large ones quartered. They turn into yum yum yum food perfect for snaffling as a snack.

>>3568

I linked to this in a thread pretty recently, but it's so good I may as well do so again.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/lonklamblancashireho_91265.shtml

The pickled red cabbage in that is absolutely amazing, and well worth a try.

I'm going to do some jams this year which is on the same way.

Thank you all for your help. I'm rather liking the idea of this, my biggest problem will probably be getting jars big enough now, if I'm going to do it, I want to do it properly and have a proper stash of pickled stuff.
Deciding exactly what to pickle may be another problem.
What are the best pickled things you lot have had?

>>3576

Shallots are superior to onions...

Other than that I don't eat that much pickled stuff, like the pickled red cabbage though (out of no interest the reason it goes pinker is due to the acid... if you get some red cabbage liquid and put it in an alkali it goes a greeney yellow)

>>3568

Not yet but i am thinking about making pickled macheral. It's nice.

Eggs
They pickle well and you can add chilli's / peppercorns etc if you want to increase extra zing. Using old pickled onion vinegar also gives a good favour.

>>3598

Pickled eggs are the devils testes.

>>3602

So are double posts. I don't pickle my own, I do love picked onions though. Especially when they've been left to stew in the vinegar for a little while.

>>3602
Agreed. Pickled eggs are evil, yet manage to conceal themselves well when pickled.

At least these look and smell disgusting so you know what to expect.

>>3606
What the fuck kind of bird laid them lumps of shit?

>>3614
It's a century egg, which can be made from chicken, duck, etc eggs.

>is a Chinese cuisine ingredient made by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice hulls for several weeks to several months, depending on the method of processing. After the process is completed, the yolk becomes a dark green, cream-like substance with a strong odor of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, transparent jelly with little flavor or taste.

Why anybody would want to eat anything which reeks of sulphur and ammonia is a mystery.

Pickled onions and shallots with chillis are awesome, pickled gherkins (cucumbers) are a delicous accompaniment to vodka, don't just take my word for it, the slavs swear by it.

>>3624
Pickled cucumbers with vodka are lovely. As we have no Russian (or even Polish!) shops we use Aldi or Lidl which are good for other little snacky things to have with vodka as well as jars of pickles.

>Why anybody would want to eat anything which reeks of sulphur and ammonia is a mystery.
I remember watching a documentary on TV about weird foods in which they got a Chinese family who loved the most rotten variation of that rotten egg thing, and a British family that loved the most stinky of Stiltons, and made each try the other. Predictably, the Chinese lot couldn't get near the Stilton without retching, and the Brits found the eggs equally inedible. I think there's something poignant in there about our ability to adapt to the food around us, though I can't quite put my finger on it. It stuck in my mind, anyway.

>>3645
I heard once somewhere that if you eat a food ten times (or so) you become accustomed to the taste and textures of it and begin to like it.

>>3646

I have eaten far more than ten olives in my life and I still hate them. I really want to like them, but it's just not happening.

>>3647
Hahaha. I've tried to force myself into liking olives too, it's not happening though. Tried with mushrooms too and prawns - I like prawns now but not mushrooms.

>>3648

I feel it is a social disability, to be honest. You go to a dinner party or anywhere there's free wine and they're practically forcing them down your neck. And you must never admit to disliking them in public, especially to people who are (or think they are) middle class. You'd get less dirty looks if you threw up in the moussaka.

>>3653

I found my route in to olives was getting the ones that have jalapenos in them, the chilli sting got rid of the aftertaste, and then I started liking them.

>>3653
Haha. This is true. Whenever I'm offered an olive and refuse, I'm treated like it's a food deviancy rather than just a normal dislike of a food.

Have you olive-haters tried different types of olive? I never used to like the black ones but got to appreciate them after eating green ones. There's a huge difference between the olives one buys in jars and the ones behind deli counters, too.

>>3658

I've tried them all, and I've heard what you're saying many, many times. 'Try this one', they'll say - 'it was flown from the hills of Florence this morning, pressed on the buttocks of the pope - it's not like any other olive!' Nope, it still just tastes like another bloody olive. Stop giving me olives. Leave me alone.

I like olive oil, isn't that enough?

I've not commented yet (I've banged on about olives here before now, I'm sure), but anyway - they all taste rancid according to my tastebuds. As in literally "god that's gone off" rancid, not just rancid as a pejorative. I've tried them in other countries, tried them famished, tried them drunk when I really wanted to like them as they were the only snack in the fridge... I always have to spit them out. Sometimes your brain tells your mouth to evacuate its contents and there's no arguing the matter, and olives hit that threshold for me.

They can ruin other dishes, too. I'm not that fussy an eater that I won't finish a dish with olives in it if it's provided for me as a guest, but quietly I fucking detest it. I guess I would refuse olive purée or something of that nature. Olive soup. Olive gravy.

Ugh.

Green olives are fine, black olives, no keep those horrid things away from me. I also often enjoy a jar of gherkins whilst drinking Vodka with a little pepper.

I'm sometimes making Nukamiso during the Winter.
That's a paste made of Rice-Bran, Salt and some bacteria. You're sticking vegetables into the paste and mix it every day so that the little guys get enough oxygen. After some days the carrots are green, soybeans are green and cabbage starts to look milky-white. The first batches are too salty but after some weeks it starts to deliver some additional taste.
There are nukamiso cultures in Japan which are over a hundred years old but mine has a tendency to become moldy after some weeks.

I was once made to pass a test of strength and courage to impress my girlfriends Dad. After a beer or two a challenge was set to eat an onion pickled in a pustulant, nose burning blue liquid containg a handful of chillis, garlic, peppercorns and cloves.

Obviously I could not refuse this challenge. The glove had been thrown down and so I braved one of the 'radioactive' onions.

Squinting as my turn recoiled from the initial alcoholic bitterness I struggled to chew the beastly bulb without vomiting the meal previously cooked by her mother.

Needless to say, I ate every bit in order to prove my worth and gratiously rejected another one.

>>3923
Didn't you have two? And you weren't made, it was because they mocked you for being southern. Ha.