After failing my first attempt at pickling and canning beets I decided to tackle them, again, and headed out to the farmer's market. After picking up the beets I decided on a simple recipe to begin with (a pickled beet recipe with red wine next!) involving the following:
-Beets
-Cinnamon sticks
-Allspice berries
-Whole cloves
-Regular and brown sugar
-Salt
-Cider vinegar
-Water
I begun by cooking the beets for various amounts of time since I had some oddly shaped ones in this batch. Afterwards, they were cooled in water, peeled, and sliced into 1/4" slices. After sterilizing the 3 one pint mason jars in a boiling water bath I brought the spices, water, sugar, salt, and vinegar to a boil and simmered for ten minutes. Oh man, can simmering vinegar burn your eyes. Not good for a small space...like my kitchen...or entire apartment for that matter. Meanwhile (with burning eyes), I packed the beets into the jars and poured the spiced vinegar mixture over the beets through a strainer.
Now, this time I was very careful to tighten the two-piece caps more this time so I wouldn't get any leakage during the 30 minute boiling water bath process. I'm still paranoid it leaked because some red water drip off two of the cans, but this was most likely residual since the entire bath was not beet red like last time. They now have to age for 3 weeks. Bah, I want to try them now!
Ah, sort of like vinegar tear gas throughout the apt! Great for movie viewing and paper writing! My question is, have you made friends with beets unpickled yet, in their naked, unadorned except by butter, salt and pepper state?
ReplyDeleteYes, Jessica has gotten me into them on salads and the such. She also introduced them to me pickled via Rick's Picks.
ReplyDelete