Pickled Chard Stems

What's this? More pickles? Didn't I just post about pickles?!

Photographic evidence that I have, in
fact, been working on something
other than food.

It really isn't my intention for this to become a food blog, but it's midsummer and the garden is doing all sorts of wonderful things. This is the first year we've been able to coax a harvest worthy of the name out of the ground, and I'm positively giddy. We've had plenty of failures this year, of course, but we're actually growing our own food! OMG!

Crafty stuff has been happening, but nothing has reached a milestone that seems blog-worthy yet. Soon though, I promise.

You know what tends to go from start to blog-able pretty quickly though? Food.

(To skip my rambling and go straight to the recipe, click here.)

This week's harvest of chard, against a
backdrop of drying garlic.

Our most productive crop by far has been chard. Our supply has yet to outpace our ability to eat it, but I also know that this glut isn't going to last forever, so I started thinking of ways to preserve the harvest. According to Google, the most common method of preservation is to blanch and freeze it, but fridge/freezer space is always at a premium in our household (especially with these tiny British fridge-freezers!), and besides, I generally prefer methods of preservation that don't require a constant supply of electricity. So I kept looking.

No more condiments are going in this
fridge until we finish all that Kimchi!
(and lemon curd, and kefir cheese...)

Apparently, it's possible to can the greens, but it requires a pressure canner, which I don't have and can't easily get in the UK. I also find canned vegetables to be barely palatable, so I'm somewhat horrified at the thought of my lovely fresh chard being pressure-cooked to a horrible, slimy mess.

So I thought about pickling. Chard leaves don't pickle terribly well, but the stems are apparently another matter. I tracked down several recipes for pickled chard stems, some lacto-fermented, some vinegar pickles. I like lacto-fermented pickles, but because they're living things, you generally need to move them into the fridge to stop them from becoming more and more sour as they age, and as I said, fridge space is in short supply. So I opted for a shelf-stable vinegar pickle this time.

As usual, my pickles are something of a Frankenstein's monster, but they draw most heavily on this recipe, with a few tweaks based on what was (and wasn't) readily to hand.

The original recipe called for a beet in order to color the brine, thus preserving the lovely pink color of the stems which would otherwise fade to brown in the jar. I didn't have any beets in the house, the beets in the garden aren't ready to harvest yet, and I didn't feel like walking a mile to the supermarket for the sake of a single beet. I did, however, have the leftover brine from last year's batch of pickled beets.

Viking archaeology!
And cooking! Together!

One of the cookbooks on my shelf is An Early Meal: a Viking Age Cookbook & Culinary Odyssey by Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg. It points out that salt was an incredibly expensive commodity in Medieval Scandinavia, and that foods would most likely be preserved by drying or smoking, or pickling in whey, but what really grabbed my attention was a sidebar marked "Salt Recovery" which claimed that most of the salt used for preservation could be recovered, I assume by boiling down the brine.

I'm not overly concerned with recovering salt, but pickling brine is filled with all sorts of lovely, flavorful herbs and spices, and it always seemed like a shame to toss it out once the pickles themselves are gone. Since reading that it's possible to re-use at least some of the brine's components, I've been jealously hoarding leftover pickling brine for just this sort of occasion. (Bonus tip: the leftover brine from zanahorias en escabeche makes awesome pickled eggs.)

The way that pickles preserve food is by reducing the moisture levels and increasing the acidity in food so that the bacteria that cause spoilage can't thrive. The salty liquid draws the moisture out of the foods and into the brine. That means that when your pickles are done, your brine contains considerably more water than when it started. To restore the brine to something like its original concentration of salt and acidity (and to kill off anything that might have been tempted to grow in spite of the difficult conditions), I simmer any brine that I'm going to re-use until it's reduced by some noticeable quantity.

The other substitution I made was something I've been wanting to test for a while. One of the tips I've heard for getting crunchier pickles is to put a layer of grape leaves at the bottom of the jar. This was easy enough to do in Southern California where there was a small grape vine in my mother's garden, but grape vines are a bit fewer and farther between in Wales. Some slightly less equatorial recipes say you can also use oak leaves. What you're looking for in both cases are tannins.

There is a very nice oak tree a little way up the road from my house, but there are hawthorn hedges literally outside my front door. Hawthorn leaves are edible and very tasty when young, the mature leaves are high in tannins. I've been meaning to try tossing them into a batch of mead in place of my usual cup of strong black tea, but my pickles will have to do for now.

And so, without further ado, here's more or less what I actually did.

For the brine:

• ½ cup leftover brine from last year's pickled beets 
• 1 mini-beet from the garden (about 1" long and 3/4" wide), sliced 
• ⅓ cup sugar 
• ⅓ cup water 
• 1 Tbsp salt 
• ⅔ cups rice vinegar (with a little bit of white wine vinegar mixed in, just because) 
• ⅓ tsp(ish) each of yellow mustard seeds, black peppercorns, whole coriander seeds, and fennel seeds 
• Very small pinch of dried chili flakes 

In the jar:

• 2 cups chard and beet stems, cut to 2" lengths 
• 8 large hawthorn leaves 
• 2 sprigs Rosemary 
• 3 cloves fresh-from-the-garden garlic, cut into thick slices, plus greens cut to match chard stems 
• 1 small carrot 

I simmered all of the brine ingredients in a small saucepan until the sugar and salt were dissolved, and the liquid reduced by some noticeable quantity.

Standing over a simmering a pot of spiced vinegar is
guaranteed to clear your sinuses.

Meanwhile, I gave my jar a good cleaning, lined the bottom with 4 large hawthorn leaves, and stuffed it full of chard stems, fresh garlic, carrot, and rosemary, ending with the other 4 hawthorn leaves on top. My jar was fairly full, with less than the recommended amount of head space, but I knew that once the brine went in, the veggies would shrink down a bit.

Jar o' veg, pre-brining.

Once the brine was cool, I poured it over the veg in the jar, put the lid on, and gave it a bit of a shake to help the contents settle, and to make sure that everything in the jar came in contact with the brine. I left it on the counter overnight, and sure enough, by the next morning, the veggies had shrunk enough for me to open the jar and squish everything down so that it was completely submerged. After a week, there was about a half inch of brine at the bottom of the jar with no vegetables in it. I had a taste, and since the flavor of the brine was still quite strong, I stuffed a few more fresh chard stems in to fill the gap.

In the interest of safety, I should probably say that you should either keep these pickles in the fridge or process them in a boiling water canner. For the longest possible shelf life, some recipes even suggest blanching the stems before pickling them. I have never (yet) had a problem with vinegar pickles spoiling on the shelf, and have sufficient common sense not to eat anything that smells or tastes rotten, so I'm leaving them as-is and trusting in the old-fashioned preserving powers of salt and vinegar. As with most things in life, you'll need to decide for yourself how much risk you're willing to accept.

After about a week in the brine, everything is
bright red and delicious.

*Edit: After a few weeks, I opened up the jar and tasted a few chard stems, and they are delicious. Kind of a sweet-savory-herby flavor, with just a little bit of crunch. I have been nibbling them alongside cheesy dishes where their acidity can help to cut the richness of the dish. I liked these so much that I went ahead and made a second, bigger batch. They definitely come out better with thicker stems.