Pickled Green Tomatoes
So you're taking out your garden and wondering what to do with all those green tomatoes. If they have the slightest bit of color change, put them aside on a windowsill or counter where they wont be in the way. They'll turn eventually.
But the green golfballs. What to do with them?
You can make fried green tomatoes, do the same triple breading that you do with eggplant, or put a bit of cracker crumbs or cornmeal in the last coating. You can eat these straight or take them the next level into Green Tomato Parmesean.
You can make green tomato marmalade. I have never eaten this, so someone will have to tell me if its good.
Or you can make pickles. I brought these to a Community Garden work party where they were consumed with gusto. Which is a good thing, because we pulled about 15 pounds of green tomatoes out of the garden already and are nowhere near done.
3 ½ cups water
3 ½ cups distilled vinegar - the cheap stuff
¼ cup pickling salt
1 tbsp mixed pickling spices
1 tbsp dill seed or a good bunch of fresh dill
3-4 cloves garlic
Green tomatoes
Food safe container, scrubbed super clean - I used a large peanut butter jar.
More apologies: I'm going to write the recipe straight. And then I'm going to write a very long set of notes on ingredients & procedures. This way you can choose which directions to follow and which ones to ignore or modify according to your taste.
Directions
Bring the water, salt, garlic and spices to a boil. Drop the temperature and let everything steep for 2-3 minutes. Fish out the garlic and put it into your foodsafe container. Put the dill into the container as well. Cut the tomatoes into large chunks or leave them whole if small. Pack them into your container, playing Tetris to get in as many as possible. Add the vinegar to the hot brine. Pour through a sieve into your
container. Cap and put into the back of the fridge for 5-7 days. Consume with gusto.
(I'm thinking about Bloody Marys.)
Save the extra solution. You might find something else you want to try pickling. Maybe some extra green beans for dillybeans or maybe even...a cucumber or two?
Notes!
Vinegar: You have to use vinegar with 4-6% acidity. Most cider, red wine and distilled vinegars are stabilized at 5% making them perfect. Rice vinegar is less acidic. Do not use it. Cider and wine vinegars bring flavor to the party, but they darken the end product. Plus, you can buy white vinegar very cheaply by the gallon, and then use it to clean with too. Economical, ecological and effective. Win! Vinegar/ Acetic Acid has a slightly lower boiling point than water. If you boil the vinegar/ water solution, you could loose all your acidity. This is why you add it after steeping the spices in the hot water.
Pickling salt: This is a finer grain product and has NO additives to increase pourability or nutrients, ex. iodine. (Check your label. They are there!) These additives precipitate out as a white powder during the production which is unattractive, but not harmful. The iodine may result in darkening of the pickles also. If you have pure kosher salt, you may be able to use this in place of pickling salt, but the proportions will be all off because of the size of the grains.
Mixed Pickling Spices: Peppercorns, bayleaf, cinnamon and other spices commonly found in sweet pickles. These tomato pickles are not sweet. I don't think this mix is essential so you could leave it out, but I had it floating around for the past 4 years - so I used it. Yeah, you could steep these in at tea ball or make a little bag out of cheesecloth. I didn't have these. You could also leave them in the liquid when you pour it over the tomatoes. This will add a more complex, almost sweet flavor to the pickle. Personally, I didn't like it as much as the steep &
remove method, but if you are a fan of sweet pickles, this might be a good thing for you.
Dill & Garlic: This is what makes the pickle taste like a pickle. I picked up dill seed because I didnt know how this was going to turn out and fresh dill is expensive. I thought the dill seed could hang around for a few years (see what happened to my Pickling Spices) and find new uses if it didn't all get used up. Do not substitute powdered or granulated garlic for a nice fresh head. Garlic turns out to have a funny reaction with acids in the presence of heat. It turns blue or green. According to my research this is unsightly but harmless. This is why I heat the garlic in the water before adding the vinegar, and then fish it out and add it back into the jar. This denatures the reaction but keeps the flavors in the family.
Do not mess with the proportions of water/ salt/ vinegar. The rest is flavoring and is up to you - but as I said: the dill and garlic are what make pickles taste like pickles. If you like spicy, you can add some hot pepper flakes to the spice mix or in the container.
I have some of these that I canned and will let you know how they fared after 20 minutes in a boiling water canner (pints & quarts).
Note: especially for UUFG - No Cholesterol!