One of my favorite aspects of cooking is making foods that are ordinarily store-bought.  Most people have probably baked cookies or simmered up some marinara, but how many people make their own bread, jams, or condiments?  Accustomed to buying certain prepared items, we tend to forget they can be made from scratch, although lately I’m seeing a resurgence in doing just that.  Controlling the quality of ingredients, avoiding unnecessary packaging, and a desire to eat “real” food the way it “used to be” made set me on the road to my first batches of pickles this summer.

I have always been a pickle lover, but I have recently swooned over pickle plates at Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York and Umami Burger here in Los Angeles that offered some pretty outlandish pickles: watermelon rind, heart of palm, carrot, apple, cauliflower, shitake, okra…a bounty of exotic and heirloom veggies brined in a variety of salty, sweet, and spicy combinations.  A far cry from the sad chartreuse spears I nonetheless enjoyed as a child, these pickles were art.  

My head reeling with the limitless pickle possibilities, my first effort was the pickled watermelon rind from the Momofuku cookbook.

I’ll humbly admit this was a near-failure.  I decided to make a double batch since a single batch only called for half a watermelon rind and, well, I had a whole watermelon, so why waste?  I’m not sure what my downfall was, but there were a few issues.  First, maybe I left too much of the pink flesh on.  When the pickles were cooked, it was kind of mushy.  Also, where the recipe indicated to add the fruit to the boiling pickling liquid and then boil for a minute, I wondered, do I let the mixture return to a boil and then time the minute?  I did, but maybe that was a mistake as it took several minutes to return to a boil after adding the cold fruit.  Overall, I thought they came out a little too sweet, and something, maybe the star anise, lent them a funky flavor.  I pawned them off on as many unsuspecting friends as possible, but they were pretty and I love the idea so I might try another more traditional “American South” recipe.

Undaunted, I forged ahead with a basic pickled beets recipe from epicurious.com using Chioggia beets, an heirloom Italian variety, instead of the dark purplish ones.  Bright red on the outside with concentric white circles inside, these lovelies yielded a pickled beet that was milder tasting and a very pretty bright pink.  These, too, were a bit on the sweet side, but definitely still tasty, unlike the watermelon rind (which I still have if anyone wants it).

After making the beets, I threw some raw purslane into the leftover pickle juice, inspired by some friends who’d bought pickled purslane (who knew you could pickle that?) at a roadside farm somewhere up the PCH.  It worked OK, but the spicier stuff my friends had gotten was much tastier, and I have to concede I don’t know the first thing about pickling purslane.  Really, I don’t know a lot about purslane at all, so let’s move on.

With one moderate success and one embarrassing failure, I thought I’d try some straight-up “Real Kosher Dills” according to Mark Bittman’s ever-useful tome How to Cook Everything.  What makes these the real deal is that they are cured with kosher salt rather than vinegar; the ingredient list is simple: water, salt, fresh dill, garlic, and Kirby cucumbers.  I also added some coriander seeds, mostly because I like the way they look floating in the jar among the spears.  Delicious and super easy, the only cooking involved was boiling water.  Packed in the Ball canning jars (which I finally tracked down at Target of all places), their classic aesthetic is charming, isn’t it?  And they really taste like a dill pickle— salty, crunchy, a nice garlic bite.  If anything they might be just a bit too salty, but that’s probably a matter of taste.  In any case, I saved the leftover pickle juice which I’m considering diluting a little and using to cure some more Kirbies, perhaps (thought this might be sacrilege) adding a handful of black peppercorns or a few dried chilies to spice things up.

Now that I can create my very own “pickle plate” at home, I feel like the possibilities are endless.  I don’t really care whether it’s an overlooked culinary treatment or a a retro-cooking fad, pickling made me want to plant a victory garden and make more of my own eclectic condiments.  Maybe ketchup is next?