Garde Manger · Side
Pickled Vegetables for the Plate
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top.
Ingredients
- 200 g rice or white wine vinegar, 5 percent acidity
- 200 g water
- 60 g caster sugar
- 12 g fine salt
- 150 g cucumber, deseeded and cut into 5 mm batons
- 100 g breakfast radish, halved
- 100 g fennel, sliced 2 mm on a mandoline
- 100 g carrot, sliced 2 mm
- 2 g coriander seed
- 1 g dill seed
- 1 bay leaf
- 2 strips lemon peel, pith scraped away
Equipment
Mandoline
The skills inside
Brining & curingKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
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
- Bring the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, seeds, bay and lemon peel to 90C (194F) and hold 2 minutes, until the brine runs clear and no grit remains on the pan base, then draw it off the heat. 2 min
- Pack the carrot and fennel into a jar and pour the brine over at 80C (176F); the heat opens the firmer roots and drives diffusion, and the edges will go translucent within a minute.
- Cool the remaining brine to 55C (131F) before pouring it over the cucumber and radish, and hold them there for 20 minutes; at that temperature their pectin methylesterase cross-links the cell walls and sets the crunch. 20 min
- Cool everything uncovered to room temperature, then hold at 4C (39F) for at least 4 hours before service; a baton is ready when it snaps cleanly and tastes seasoned rather than raw. 240 min
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.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
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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