Hungarian · Side
Kovászos uborka
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg small ridge cucumbers, firm and unwaxed
- 1 litre water
- 30 g fine salt, not iodised
- 2 thick slices of sourdough rye bread
- 4 dill crowns with their stems
- 6 garlic cloves, bruised
The skills inside
Brining & curingStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Trim both ends of each cucumber and split them lengthways from tip to almost the base, so brine can reach the seed core.
- Dissolve the salt in the water, warming it if it will not go, and let it fall to blood heat.
- Pack the jar with dill, garlic and cucumbers standing upright, tuck the bread down the sides below the surface and pour the brine over so nothing floats.
- Cover the mouth with a plate rather than a lid and stand the jar in full sun until the brine turns cloudy and the cucumbers go from opaque green to olive and translucent.
- Lift out the bread, strain the brine and store cucumbers and brine together in the cold.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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