Polish · Side
Ogórki Kiszone
- 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
- 1.5 kg small ridge cucumbers, firm and freshly picked
- 1.5 litres water
- 45 g coarse salt without iodine, 30 g per litre
- 1 head of garlic, cloves peeled
- 4 flowering dill heads with stalk and seed
- 40 g fresh horseradish root, plus a leaf if you have one
- 8 blackcurrant or oak leaves
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Soak the cucumbers in cold water for two hours and rub off the blossom end of each one.
- Boil the water with the salt to dissolve it, then cool it right down to room temperature.
- Pack the cucumbers upright in a scalded jar with the garlic, dill, horseradish and leaves distributed through them rather than piled on top.
- Pour over the brine to cover by 3 cm, weight everything under the surface and cover loosely; whatever sits above the brine will mould.
- Hold at 20C (68F) until the brine goes cloudy and the fizzing slows, three days for lightly soured małosolne and about ten for fully sour, then move to a cold cellar or the fridge.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique 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.
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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