Pickled fennel is awesome alongside poultry or fish, or with salami. This is a sweet-sour pickle with a hint of vanilla – surprisingly good with fennel bulbs.
Preservation Recipes
Whole books and websites are dedicated to preservation recipes, so what follows is merely my collection of about three dozen recipes for pickles, ferments and salted foods.
Not all are wild, in fact many are done with vegetables from my garden. You will also see recipes for pickled and dried meats and fish, too.
Most Popular
Some of my most popular preservation recipes include those for basic country mustard, preserved hot or sweet peppers, Swedish pickled herring and Minnesota-style pickled pike.
Garden Vegetables
I have kept a garden for decades, and I preserve a lot of the harvest, so you'll see plenty of preservation recipes for "regular" garden vegetables.
Some of my favorites are pickled artichokes, brine-pickled, fermented carrots, and a pressure-canned, preserved garlic recipe that is a show-stopper.
Wild Foods
As a gatherer of mushrooms and wild edible plants since I was a boy, I preserve whatever I can't eat right away -- especially because, as we all know, nature waits for no one.
Some of the recipes I use every year are my Italian marinated mushrooms, pickled mustard greens -- wild or farmed greens work equally well here -- and pickled ramps, which works with any small onion, wild or grown.
Similarly, I pickle wild Sierra Nevada blueberries or huckleberries, and they're amazing, but you can do the same with supermarket blueberries.
Meats and Fish
Most of my preservation recipes for meat are in my collection of salami recipes, or jerky recipes, but you'll find some excellent recipes for fish and seafood here. Other than the herring and pike recipes above, I have a smoked, dried shrimp recipe and a classic Lowcountry pickled shrimp recipe.
The Latest
Pickled Grape Leaves
Pickled grape leaves sound odd, but they are the preserved grape leaves you use for various Mediterranean dishes, like dolmades, the stuffed grape leaves from Greece. If you live in grape country — and most of us do — May through early July is the best time to make pickled grape leaves to use for
Sour Corn
Southern sour corn, a lacto-fermented pickled corn, is a specialty in Appalachia. Sweet, tart and crunchy!
Green Chile Pasado
Chile pasado is a Mexican method of preserving green chiles. You char the green chiles, skin them and then dry them out for use later.
Nopales en Escabeche
A recipe for nopales en escabeche, pickled nopales from Mexico. Prickly pear cactus pads, diced and piickled with jalapenos, carrots and onions.
Pickled Shrimp
I finally managed to catch myself some shrimp, and, since it was down in Mobile, I decided to make a Southern classic, pickled shrimp.
Making Lye-Cured Olives
Many of the olives I cure each year are done in a brine. But year after year I’ve been curing more with lye. I know it sounds scary, but it’s not – if you follow these simple instructions. The result is a buttery, firm olive that I actually prefer over the brine cured ones.
Italian Marinated Mushrooms
Marinated mushrooms are a staple on any antipasti plate, and if you can get porcini, which are popping in the Rockies now, so much the better. Here’s how to do the technique the Italians call sott’olio.