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www.gourmetnews.com Gourmet News • Oli e Aceti 15 BY MICAH CHEEK It took me years to come to terms with a dark truth about myself: If I don't use a vegetable the day I buy it, that vegetable is dead to me. It will go into refrigerator pur- gatory until I remember it way too late and put it out of its misery. For a long time I thought that this was a fact of life, and that I could never buy vegetables in bulk. This whole time, the answer to this vicious in- ternal struggle was quick pickling, and I learned that through a series of experi- ments that have proved the value of this technique. Quick pickling is distinct from fermen- tation pickling in that you add a hot, acidic brine all at once instead of letting fermentation create the acid content over time. The downside is that there's no time for probiotics to cul- tivate; the upside is that the process is lightning fast. Just about any big pile of vegetables can be quickly processed, giving them a second life as delicious pickles. For my tests, I used a standard ratio of one part water to one part vinegar, one table- spoon each of sugar and salt per pound of vegetable, plus a couple of shakes of mixed pickling spices. The wet and dry ingredients were boiled together before I poured the resulting brine into Ball mason jars filled with various vegetables. For my first experiment, I pickled as- paragus in a white vinegar brine. For denser produce like asparagus, the heat from the brine isn't quite enough to soften the woody texture. I ended up with a bet- ter product when I gave the asparagus a quick blanch in plain boiling water before shocking and pickling. The clean taste of white vinegar is a great match for the sub- tle taste of asparagus. The finished product would make a great cocktail stirrer for a Bloody Mary. For my second jar, I paired garlic cloves with apple cider vinegar. Some kind of garlic peeler is essential for this, be- cause three bulbs of garlic barely yielded me a third of a jar ready for pickling. You will be doing a lot of peeling. I went with apple cider vinegar to com- plement the sweet flavors that come from cooked gar- lic. This is another one that requires a little bit of pan toasting or blanching, not because of texture, but because of flavor. Hot brine alone was not enough to cook the garlic cloves, and the semi-raw garlic was too intense to be really en- joyable. Prebaking really rounds out the garlic's flavor and softens the texture. Once cooked, the garlic flavor paired with the sweet vinegar very nicely. These would be great served as a garnish to a sauce or stabbed through a toothpick with a slice of kielbasa or another tasty sausage appetizer. As a word of warning, about half my garlic turned blue. Scientists aren't sure why, but garlic will occasionally turn blue when cooked with something acidic. The good news is, these colorful cloves are still safe to eat. The third pickle was my favorite part of Korean barbecue: thinly sliced and pickled daikon radish. Daikons are a variety of radish that is available at most specialty grocers and Asian markets. These radishes have a more subtle flavor than the red radishes you might be used to, with a texture that can stand up to a little heat. A mandoline is a great option for getting paper thin slices of radish. I used Marukan rice vinegar as per the recommen- dation of a lot of recipes I saw. The slightly toasty flavor of rice vinegar works really well with funk of daikon. The re- sulting slices were perfectly cooked and made a nice crisp base that could hold all kinds of things. My first thought was crab salad, but it would be a match for most fatty foods. For the last recipe, I de- cided to get a little wild. I wanted to try pickling in Colavita balsamic vinegar, but there were a couple of problems: the dark color of the vinegar tends to stain any veg- etable that comes into contact with it; and balsamic also has such a distinctive flavor that it can overpower anything that goes in with it. To stand up to both those fac- tors, I chose beets. The earthy flavor and bright red color powered through and pro- duced tasty pickled beet coins. Sliced thinly, the beets cook evenly and retain a little crunch. These would make a great salad topper with a little goat cheese. GN Vinegar Variety in Quick Pickling enjoy eating it. They'd soak rice with the vinegar and stuff it into mackerel to pre- serve it for the journey, thus beginning a long Japanese tradition of saba sushi. The sushi rolls we know today, nigiri sushi and even poke bowls all come out of that tra- dition of wrapping food together with vinegar-soaked rice to help preserve it. Rice vinegar first came to the U.S. as a product sold to those familiar with Japanese culinary traditions, but over time, it's been adopted into the American culinary lexicon because its mild flavor makes it desirable as an ingredient in marinades and salad dress- ings as well as in Asian fusion dishes like a Chinese chicken salad or a seared ahi tuna salad. "I hate to think of dressing a Chinese chicken salad with anything other than Marukan Seasoned Gourmet. You've got all that beautiful cabbage and the expensive chicken and the mandarin oranges," Tan- klage said. "You never want to take a beau- tiful salad that people put their heart and soul into and finish it off with a lesser vine- gar with a harsh flavor." Most recently, the Marukan rice vinegars are sought after by both fine-dining chefs and the food processors who are blending them into commercial salad dressings to contribute flavor without adding a lot of sugar or salt. The Marukan vinegars are also valued because they're verified to con- tain no genetically modified ingredients and for their extremely short ingredient lists that make it easy to verify that the dressing is gluten free. "Rice vinegar is the perfect vinegar. It gives you that sour back- ground note," Tanklage said. "Oftentimes what's missing to bring all the flavors to- gether is a little acidity or sourness to bal- ance the other flavors in a dish." For more information, visit Marukan USA at www.ricevinegar.com, which has been recently revamped with recipes and ideas as well as a blog. Find the company also on Facebook, which is a great place for recipes, stories about the chefs who are using it and creative ways to use the product. GN Marukan (Cont'd. from p. 14)