A Year of Pickles

It’s hard to believe that this time last year I was gearing up for my cookbook’s release. Sample recipes from The Complete Guide to Pickling at TwiceasTasty.com.
Fermented Red Onions and Half-Sour Dill Pickles. Photograph by Andrew Purcell.

It’s hard to believe that this time last year I was gearing up for the launch of my first cookbook, The Complete Guide to Pickling. The timeline of writing and publishing a book means that I spent September 2020 sitting on my hands, resisting the urge to share my favorite recipes from the book ahead of the sales schedule and Brenda Ahearn’s stunning photos from my side project, The Pickled Picnic recipe collection, before the cookbook’s release.

As the cookbook’s official on-sale and launch party dates approached, I shared a handful of recipes from the book and offered details on some helpful tools I’d discovered while working on the project. This year, I’m able to get a jump on sharing new recipes from the book while many of us are still in the heart of harvest season.
Sample recipes from The Complete Guide to Pickling

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The Complete Guide to Pickling

I’m excited to officially announce that my first cookbook is coming out. Read more about The Complete Guide to Pickling at TwiceasTasty.com.
After a lot of hard work for the past several months, I’m excited to officially announce that my first cookbook is coming out: The Complete Guide to Pickling. It’s packed with essential information and 125 flavorful recipes, including homegrown classics and international flavors. You’ll find straightforward and scrumptious recipes for quick, fresh, and fermented pickles, as well as sweet and fruity pickles, hot sauces, relishes, salsas, krauts, chutneys, and more.

This month’s posts will focus on the book, including sneak peaks at recipes, bonus info about the project, and a new digital recipe collection that uses the pickles.
Read more about my new cookbook

Chilies

You could call this week’s main recipe a food fail. A couple of years ago, I set out to make homemade sriracha. I had grocery bags full of hot peppers that season, and I thought some were destined to become chipotles for Grilled Tomato Chipotle Salsa and others would be fermented to replicate the flavor of the classic Thai chili sauce and paste.

Then we started smoking chilies and attempting to find the perfect balance of smoke and heat. Suddenly I had grocery bags of smoked chilies—which would not ferment. Even at the low temperatures used for smoking, the heat was high enough to kill off the natural bacteria in the peppers that are essential for fermentation. But I was too stubborn not to try. And although my chili paste never fermented, it was delicious.

So now I make Home-Smoked Chili Paste every year and have yet to miss that bottle sriracha on my shelf. I’ve since learned that adding a culture could allow me to smoke and then ferment, so expect more experimentation down the road. But for now, what could be called a food fail has turned into a favorite kitchen staple.
Learn to smoke chilies and make Home-Smoked Chili Paste