Sweet Pickles!

No, not those sweet pickles, the delicious kind you use to stuff your face!

Anyway, with the arrival of those cute pickling cucumbers in last week's box, pickles of some sort were in order. I have been experimenting with tsukemono recipes lately, and decided to try out a recipe for sweet pickles from a tsukemono cookbook I picked up.



The recipe called for normal salt pickles to start. Basically, you slice the cucumbers in half, mix them up with 5% of their weight worth of salt, and put pressure on them for about 24 hours. The salt should draw out the water, thereby picking. I also added a little salted water because I had so few cucumbers, and was concerned that there would not be enough liquid to immerse the vegetables. I have a cool little press for the pressure duty, called a tsukemonoki (similar to this one; mine was from United Noodles) but a bowl, plate and weight of some sort should work as well.



After 24 hours, I washed the pickles off, and set them aside to dry.



I then set out to make the marinade to sweeten them up. I mixed

1 1/2 cups rice vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1 bay leaf
1 dried chili pod
1/2 cinnamon stick
6 pepper corns

and then brought the whole mess to a boil. I set it aside to cool down to room temperature. After it was all set, I put the pickles in a jar and dumped the marinade over the top and shoved them in the fridge. After another 24 hours (all this waiting was making me really want these pickles) they were all nice smelling, and pretty nice tasting to boot.