We’ll be posting pickles and condiments over the next week or so — all will be pretty easy, and most will be coming from one of our favorite cookbooks, Ad Hoc at Home, by Thomas Keller. This is partly because they were recipes that we wanted to try, but, mainly, it was because we were busy making these things for a small French-style picnic luncheon we were catering. With everything going on during the holiday season, these simple recipes were really lifesavers, just as they were listed in the book.
We chose this recipe because it uses the same basic pickling brine as the Ad Hoc Pickled carrots, and, since we were making the carrots, it was simple enough to make just a bit more brine and pickle a bit of cauliflower at the same time. We list the original recipe, knowing that scratchers such as you will be able to scale it up or down.
Ad Hoc Pickled Cauliflower
Ingredients
- 1/2 tsp piment d’Espelette or allepo pepper
- 1 cup Champagne vinegar (240 g)
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar (100 g)
- 1/2 cup water (120 g)
- 4 cups cauliflower florets about 1 inch in size
Instructions
- Combine the piment d’Espelette, vinegar, sugar, and water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil, dissolving sugar. Let cool to room temperature.
- Bring a large kettle of salted water to a boil. Add cauliflower and blanch until crisp-tender, about 4 to 5 minutes. Drain.
- Transfer cauliflower to canning jars and pour pickling liquid over the top. Let cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate.
Ingredient discussion:
We don’t have piment d’Espelette, so, we used something we do have on hand: Allepo pepper. It’s a fruity, spicy pepper that one of us finds quite tasty, even sprinkling it on popcorn regularly. We did go buy some Champagne vinegar, but we think that white wine vinegar would be fine, too.
Procedure in detail:
Make brine. Naturally, if you’re only going to make a small amount of pickled cauliflower, as we did, cut back on the amount of brine you make. Just be sure to keep the same ratio of vinegar to sugar to water, and reduce the amount of pepper accordingly. Place all the brine ingredients, pepper, vinegar, sugar, and water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil, stirring so the sugar dissolves completely. Let cool to room temperature. We’ll be pouring the brine over already par-cooked cauliflower, and we don’t want hot brine to cook the cauliflower further.
Blanch cauliflower. Bring a large kettle of salted water to a full, rolling boil. Add the cauliflower and boil until it’s partly cooked. It should be a bit crisp, but not raw. Boiling time should be 4-5 minutes. Drain completely.
Pack. Transfer the cauliflower to jars, or other appropriate containers, and pour the brine over, making sure the cauliflower is covered. Once again, let cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate.
We don’t think these are as good as the carrots, mainly because cauliflower, being a cruciferious vegetable, can taste somewhat of sulfur. We’d hoped that the blanching would help in this regard, but the final pickles still tasted a bit sulfur-y; we don’t really care for that. We’ll give these just three stars.
