And the ways cooks can preserve both hot and sweet ones are equally bounteous.

By CHRISTINE BURNS RUDALEVIGE   –   Portland Press Herald

Peppers are very hot right now, even the sweet ones.

At my favorite Friday morning farmers market in Brunswick, I counted 18 different varieties. I bought a bagful, let them sit beautifully in a bowl for a day, and then had to figure out what to do with them.

Those over 80-degree summer days (21 in July, 20 in August here in southern Maine) were just the right temperature for Capsicum to thrive, says Source’s own garden guru Tom Atwell. Roberta Bailey of Seven Trees Farm in Vassalboro has been growing all sorts of peppers since the 1980s. She confirmed this summer was indeed a great year for peppers, more so for sweet than hot, but both are bounteous.

Bailey cultivates Czech Black (her favorite!), Fish, Hidalgo serrano (her other favorite), Matchbox and Thai Hot for seed for Fedco Seeds in Waterville. She removes the seeds from her peppers, steams the flesh, purees it with garlic, and mixes it with the same amount of either cooked carrots or sweet potato to make a hot sauce akin to a Thai Sriracha.

Another way to preserve the 2016 pepper season would be to save seeds from this year’s fruit to plant next spring. Make sure your peppers came from open-pollinated parents if you’d like to reproduce the very same kind of pepper, Bailey warned. If your pepper is a hybrid, you can still save the seeds and plant them, but you could very well get a plant resembling any of the varieties crossed to produce the hybrid you liked, she said.

Grey Goose Gourmet pepper jellies are made in Wayne with primarily local peppers, owner Sandra Dwight-Barris said. The company’s Original Pepper Jelly, crafted from a recipe Dwight-Barris’ mother gave her 25 years ago, includes bell peppers, as well. “This coming year we will be using 100 percent local peppers,” said Dwight-Barris, in part because of the bumper crop and in part because she bought a new freezer, as the five she filled last year with processed pepper jelly starter didn’t meet demand.

To freeze the peppers, she washes and stems them, deseeding some to keep the heat in check. She uses a powerful blender to make a pulp, which she then freezes in containers measured out for her batches of jelly. Freezing them diminishes neither the flavor nor the heat, she said.

Homesteader and blogger Rachel Arsenault says her hot peppers – the Anaheim, jalapeño, Hungarian wax she grew from commercial seed and the experimental ones she collected from dried de arbol, japones and guajillo chillies – are all coming off the plants much hotter than they were last year. She dries her fair share in a dehydrator and stores them in jars, but she also likes to blister them on the grill as a key ingredient in huge batches of salsa, which she then freezes.

To freeze the King of the North bell peppers she grows, Arsenault slices them into strips before placing them in freezer bags for use in fajitas during the winter months. She freezes jalapeño peppers whole, explaining that they are easy to chop when partially frozen.

Portland’s Sur Lie chef Emil Rivera is partial to pickled peppers. He uses a house brine of Champagne vinegar seasoned with black pepper; and coriander, mustard and fennel seeds to pickle mild cherry bomb and shishito peppers, which softens the texture of the flesh and adds an obvious sour note to cut rich dishes like the restaurant’s braised short ribs.

Rivera also juliennes jalapeños to sauté very lightly with local mushrooms and butter and stuffs poblanos with whatever strikes his fancy on any given day.

As is traditional in a tapas place, Rivera also serves grill-blistered Padrón peppers sprinkled with sea salt. Eaters play a Russian roulette of sorts with these, because they don’t know which ones are mild and which ones are numbing. Rivera says this summer’s weather has increased his diners’ chances of getting a hot one by threefold.

I am a self-proclaimed heat wimp, so I won’t be playing with Padrón. I like to manage the heat of my preserved peppers, tasting a tiny bit of each one as I slice them for jars of Candied Mixed Peppers so I can balance the really hot ones with a calming selection of the sweeter ones.

To each his own, I guess. Fortunately for pepper eaters this year, we do not want for choices.

Christine Burns Rudalevige is a food writer, a recipe developer and tester, and a cooking teacher in Brunswick. Contact her at: cburn1227@gmail.com.

Written by Barb Randall   –   Lake Oswego Review

My favorite farmers market vendor had pickling cucumbers this week. I didn’t buy any, but after my sister bragged that she had made a batch of our Grandma Fanny’s dill pickles, I knew pickling was in my future.

And when my friend, Austin Durant, founder of the Fermenters Club and organizer of the Oregon Fermentation Festival, sent a release about the second-annual Oregon Fermentation Festival happening Sept. 10, I knew I’d be pickling this weekend.

Are pickles fermented? I called Austin for clarification.

“All fermented foods are pickled, but not all pickles are fermented,” he said.

He explained that vinegar, which is a fermented food, is used to make pickles, and the lactic acid of the vinegar is the preservative in pickles, and will keep out pathogens. Since vinegar is shelf-stable and distilled, pickles do not have live bacteria, in other words, there are no probiotics in pickles.

“Fermented foods are made with a brine, a mixture of water and salt,” he said. “Which naturally produces lactic acids to preserve the foods, which encourages the growth of probiotics, or good bacteria and nutrients.”

So what’s the difference?

There are two types of pickles:

n Quick, or unfermented, pickles are made in one or two days by adding acid in the form of vinegar to vegetables. It is critical to add enough vinegar to prevent bacterial growth.

n Brined, or fermented, pickles require several weeks of “curing” at room temperature. During this period, colors and flavors change. A brine made of water and salt reacts with the starches and sugars in the foods, and is converted into lactic acid by bacteria. The lactic acid production is what gives fermented foods their unique sour smell and flavor, and is also what makes fermented foods live, nutritive superfoods.

During the fermentation process, probiotics, or healthy bacteria are produced. Probiotics are known to be effective in treating a variety of conditions, and more and more is being discovered about the link between the bacteria composition of our bodies and overall health.

Probiotic-rich fermented foods have a variety of health benefits: They aid digestion, enhance the nutrient availability of food and ward off harmful pathogens in the digestive system. They also help to enhance immune system functioning, affect lipid metabolism, have cancer-fighting effects and other benefits.

Want to learn more? You can by attending the second-annual Oregon Fermentation Festival from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 10, at Kruger’s Farm, 17100 N.W. Sauvie Island Road, Portland. Tickets are $19 general admission and $30 for the Ambrosia Garden ticket, for those 21 and older, which allows holders to sample 10 tastes of local and regional beer, wine, cider and mead — all fermented foods.

The festival includes a number of presentations, workshops and an opportunity to make a jar of pickles, live music, vendor samples and a marketplace to buy fermentation and pickling equipment.

If you cannot attend the festival this weekend, attend Oregon State University’s Fermented Foods class from 6-9 p.m. Sept. 22, at the Clackamas County Extension Office. Seating is limited; get more information and register by calling 503-655-8631. They offer a variety of food preservation classes through the fall.

I have fond memories of making Grandma Fanny’s dill pickles. As a safety factor, my sister and I have had the recipe reviewed by OSU Extension, to ensure it is up-to-date with food safety guidelines. On the website extension.oregonstate.edu/community/food-preservation you can find a wealth of information about pickling and fermenting, as well as recipes for how to pickle just about anything.

If you still have questions, call the OSU Food Preservation and Safety Hotline, 800-354-7319. It is open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday through Oct. 19.

I am sharing their recipe for Quick Kosher Dills today. It’s simple and will give you tasty results.

Bon Appétit! Make eating an adventure!

Quick Kosher Dills

Yield 6 to 7 pints or 3 to 4 quarts

4 pounds pickling cucumbers, about 4 inches long

3 cups water

3 cups vinegar (5 percent acidity)

1/4 cup pickling salt

14 garlic cloves, split

14 heads of fresh dill

28 peppercorns

2 teaspoons hot red pepper flakes or 14 whole chiles (optional)

Wash cucumbers. Cut 1/16-inch off blossom end but leave 1/4-inch of stem on the other end. Cut in half lengthwise. Heat salt, vinegar and water to boiling. Pack cucumbers into sanitized pint or quart jars, adding 4 garlic halves, 2 heads dill and 4 peppercorns per jar. Add 1/4 teaspoon chili flakes or 2 chiles per pint, if desired.

Pour hot vinegar solution over cucumbers leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace, if needed. Wipe rims and process as follows.

If at an altitude of 1,000-6,000 feet, process pint jars 15 minutes and quarts for 20 minutes.

(Recipe courtesy from “Pickling Vegetables” on the OSU Extension website, extension.oregonstate.edu/community/food-preservation.)

Randall welcomes your food questions and research suggestions. She can be reached at 503-636-1281 ext. 100 or by email atbrandall@lakeoswegoreview.com. Follow her on Twitter @barbrandallfood.

By Donna Evans, Food Columnist   –   Pine & Lake Echo Journal

It has been a typical gardening year. The growing started slowly and then there was an explosion of ripe vegetables – dozens of cucumbers, hundreds of green beans and scads of tomatoes.

A long time ago I spent quite a bit of time canning so this fresh produce could be enjoyed throughout the year, but I’ve gotten out of that habit. I do freeze green beans and most likely some of the tomatoes will end up in the freezer to be used for soups and stews, but cucumbers are one vegetable that does not freeze very well, and most everyone I know has more cucumbers than they need.

So it was time to do some investigating and find new recipes. Digging through cookbooks and researching online, I stumbled into the world of pickling. Almost any vegetable can be pickled: carrots, beets, green beans and, of course, cucumbers.

A lot of recipes don’t call for extensive equipment or long cooking times. There aren’t a lot of hard rules you have to follow when making refrigerated pickles, but I did run across a few tips that I found quite useful:

• As with a lot of things, water is the key. Avoid using hard water. If you have any doubts at all about the quality of your water, use purified water. You’ll end up with a much better tasting pickle.

• A typical ingredient used in making any type of pickle is vinegar. Make sure to use a vinegar with at least 5 percent acetic acid.

• Use a good quality salt. It is recommended to use pure sea salt without any additives or salt labeled “canning” or “pickling” salt. Additives in table salt may make the brine cloudy and affect the taste.

The process of making refrigerated pickles is actually quite easy. Begin by washing and chopping your vegetables into whatever shape you’d like – spears, chunks or disks. There are certain vegetables, such as beets, that should be partially cooked first, but most vegetables can go right into the brine without being cooked.

Start by using a basic recipe. You can experiment by using different fresh or dry flavorings, such as bay leaves, chile peppers, cumin seed, mustard seed, pickling spice, jalapeno peppers, dill, garlic, turmeric or oregano, and adjust to your taste.

You need a brine for the actual pickling process. A brine is a combination of vinegar, salt and sugar that is boiled and then poured over your vegetables. The vegetables can be placed into any clean jar that has a tight-fitting lid. You place the vegetables in the jar, cover with brine, tighten the lid and place the jar in the fridge. Let the pickles sit at least 24 hours. Then – ta da, homemade pickles!

If you are really strapped for time, you can cheat. Remember that jar of pickles in the fridge with just one tiny piece left in it? Take the piece out and re-use that liquid. Put your freshly cut vegetables into the liquid. Make sure the vegetables are completely covered. If they aren’t, add a bit more vinegar (and sugar to taste) until the vegetables are completely covered.

Again, let things sit a day or two and you will have a fresh batch of pickles.

Refrigerator pickles don’t have as long of a shelf life as pickles that go through an actual cooking process, but they should last at least a month. That is, unless your family gets to them first.

Here’s a great recipe! Happy Eating!

 

Virtually the entire crop of Ontario’s cucumbers used to make pickles and relish are purchased by a firm in Wisconsin.

By Jennifer Wells   –   Hamilton Spectator

THAMESVILLE, ONT. — It’s hot — a real scorcher — and the parched dirt kicks up underfoot as the farmer leads the way to a cucumber field that is a carpet of green leaf laced with sun yellow flowers.

The farmer stands tall in the field as he snaps a fist-sized cucumber in half, takes a few bites, then lobs the remainder in a high arc against a soft blue sky.

“It’s too big,” says Adrian Jaques, by which he means the cuke he’s tossing has outgrown not only its dill pickle potential but even its relish potential, for it is watery and heavily seeded.

Adrian Jaques, owner of Sunshine Farms located near Thamesville, Ontario.

That single cucumber is an outlier. It’s rare for a cuke to be rejected at Sunshine Farms, run by the Jaques family just north of Thamesville, about 80 km southwest of London.

Seventy-five per cent of the cucumbers grown in Ontario are hand harvested, and the Jaques operation is no exception. This is a crucial harvesting distinction from the U.S., where machine harvesting cucumbers means making a one-time pass, where plant and cucumbers, from the wee to the super-sized, are wrenched from the field all at a go. Job done.

Hand harvesting allows multiple passes along the plant rows, so those strangely warted baby dills remain undamaged and pint-sized, and the whole dills are stout and just the way you like them. Sunshine cucumbers go from harvest to brine within a day or two. Sometimes, a cucumber goes from field to jar in the span of a single day, the ultimate “fresh pack.”

The nubs and crooks and castoffs get fed through a chopper, then mixed in a vat with organic sugar and vinegar, red peppers, onion salt and spices (turmeric, mustard seed, celery seed) to create a home-grown, home-processed organic sweet relish of incomparable taste. No water is added in the process. There are no chemical additives or preservatives and no colouring, which explains why the relish does not bear the artificial emerald green hue of some of its competitors.

Well, “competitors” overstates the case. Sunshine is small, with revenues of about $800,000 annually. The company hasn’t been in the pickling game all that long, relative to the five generations of the Jaques family that have farmed in Chatham-Kent. It was Adrian’s father, John, who seized upon the idea of pickling asparagus back in the early ’80s, and ever since then the company has been processing pickled spears, including a “zesty” version enhanced by jalapeno peppers.

“Our biggest market for our pickled asparagus is bars and restaurants to put in Caesars,” says Adrian. “It has a nice crunch to it and it stands up well in a glass.”

Alberta and B.C. were early adopters. “We started in the western market because they’ve always been ahead of the curve when it comes to natural and organic,” he says.

Sunshine’s flight of pickle products extends now to fiery dills, bread and butter pickles, pickled beets, pickled carrots, pickled garlic, pickled jalapenos and more. The Big Carrot on the Danforth and Ambrosia Natural Foods in Vaughan are two of the retailers that carry Sunshine product. Costco has started carrying the one-litre jars of pickled asparagus. Relish production, meanwhile, doubled last year to more than 300 cases. Production this year should increase again by 25 per cent.

If not a singular story, Sunshine’s is certainly one that goes against the tide.

“There used to be a pickle brining operation in almost every small town in southwestern Ontario,” says Craig Hunter of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association.

Heinz produced its sour spiced gherkins and sour mixed pickles at its Leamington plant even before the first ketchup was bottled in 1910. Bick’s started in the pickle business in the 1940s in Scarborough, its name long synonymous with Canadian pickles until it became synonymous with multinational takeovers. The Bick’s processing plant in Dunnville and its pickle tank farm in Delhi have been four years idle since U.S. parent J.M. Smucker Co. announced the closure of both facilities.

“People are buying branded name pickles in our grocery stores and they don’t read the fine print to see where those pickles are actually from,” Hunter says.

Today, 98 per cent of Ontario’s cucumbers are purchased by vegetable broker Hartung Brothers, Inc., of Madison, Wisc. There’s a better than excellent chance that the product sitting on the Ontario grocery shelf is processed in the U.S.

Then there’s India. Loblaws No Name sweet green relish, baby dills, polskie ogorki and dill chips are all clearly labelled product of India. Adrian Jaques says that consumers are increasingly taking note. “We’re finding a lot more people contacting us and saying, ‘I’ve been buying these pickles for a long time and I looked at the label and they’re made in India. I never knew that.'”

A few years ago, he recalls, a businessman from India checked out the Sunshine operation, expressing interest in pickled asparagus. He had no interest in dills or relish. Holding a litre jar of baby dills in his hand he said, “I can have this harvested, packed and shipped to Toronto for $1.29.” Who can compete with that?

For Sunshine, the “Buy Local” push has been a great help, Jaques says, as has the focus on organic. But Craig Hunter notes that those seeking local produce remain a small slice of the market. “Consumers vote with their pocketbook. They always vote for what’s cheapest and they don’t really care if their head of lettuce was grown in the Bradford Marsh or Arizona. There are very few consumers who will say I won’t buy it because it wasn’t produced locally.”

Alan Woodbridge, vice-president at family-owned Lakeside Packing Co., says the stay local movement has, on the contrary, been a great boon. Woodridge’s grandfather started the company in Harrow in 1948, spurred by a desire to meet the consumer tastes of immigrating Europeans. No question recent years have been tough. “We’ve been at it for 70 years and we’re still fighting,” says Woodbridge. But, he adds, “Everyone is asking for our product because it’s Ontario grown and Ontario manufactured.”

Lakeside produces a range of relishes, including tangy dill and corn relish. The most popular? Sweet green, of course. The company has found success too in the bulk market, supplying hamburger and hotdog companies, and even exporting to European hotdog vendors.

The Jaques family is hoping that growing demand for local foods — an initiative pushed by the government of Premier Kathleen Wynne — will lead to a doubling of Sunshine’s operation within a decade.

New products are being tested, including pickled sliced onions, and this summer Sunshine has planted its first ever crop of organic horseradish. Adrian Jaques has left behind a teaching career to focus exclusively on building the company, so there’s a great deal of optimism at stake.

There’s a good amount of success to back that up. After all, it was a swift-footed John Jaques who watched in dismay as free-trade and the folding of Ontario-base food processors forced him to rethink what to do with all that asparagus that used to be destined for canned spears.

“It was stressful because our main customers for our product were the processors, and slowly but surely they all moved south of the border to brother or sister production plants,” Adrian says. “We immediately started cutting back our acreage because everyone had to sell onto the fresh market at that point. You get that much extra product on the market and the price plummets.”

A holidaying John Jaques adds via email that free trade “almost devastated our asparagus farming business. At the time free trade was implemented almost all of our produce was sold to several of the 12 asparagus processors in Canada. After free trade processors started purchasing finished products from the U.S. and eventually Peru and after a few years all quit processing asparagus in Canada.”

The Jaques operation wasn’t set up for grading and packaging asparagus for the fresh market. So the family started experimenting — freezing, dehydrating, even a puréed version. “One thing that resonated with everyone was pickled asparagus,” says Adrian.

So the Jaques clan became pickling experts — it didn’t hurt that Adrian’s mother, Claudia, proved an excellent resource when it came to recipe testing and that a serendipitous meeting between John and a grocery executive in a hot tub at the Banff Springs Hotel would prove central to launching pickled asparagus in Alberta.

Pickled pickles was an obvious path to greater growth.

Back in the field, foreman Aristeo Perez Garcia leads his small picking crew up the rows of cucumbers and back. Each year for the past 17, Perez Garcia has flown in from his home in San Miguel Tenochtitlán, Mexico, where he grows corn, to work for the Jaques family. The crew started at 6 this morning. By early afternoon, they’re driving the day’s harvest to Sunshine’s fantastically rickety pickle separator, a remnant of the heyday of another Ontario pickle works. The separator shimmies and shakes as the cucumbers are separated by grade and when it sputters, Adrian Jaques gets a wrench and fixes the thing.

Those cucumbers destined to be dills will later be placed into jars by hand. The dried dill is scooped into those jars by hand. The relish is stirred in big vats, by hand, to which the sweetening and seasoning is added, by hand. For a moment it feels as though the clock has been turned back 100 years. It’s certainly the antithesis of the globalized marketplace.

Adrian Jaques hopes consumers will see the value in products grown and processed right here at home. Perhaps the waning days of summer spent tending a backyard barbecue is a moment to hit the point home.

There’s only one more question to ask: which pickle does Adrian Jaques prefer on his burger? There’s no dawdling with the answer: he loves the relish and the dills, but when it comes to his burger, Adrian Jaques is a bread and butter pickle man.

By Doris Reynolds   –   Naples Daily News

What did Cleopatra, Queen Victoria, Napoleon, Aristotle, Andy Griffith, Elvis Presley and Thomas Jefferson have in common? They were all passionate pickle mavens with a craving for the pungent perfect puckerer.

Long before spas, beauty salons, wellness centers and gyms existed, Queen Cleopatra turned to pickles to enhance her raven locks and luminescent skin. Each day she scarfed down pecks of pickles to enhance her health and beauty. Pickles were the beauty treatment of Egyptian women who had no Botox, collagen, facelifts, tummy tucks, rhinoplasty, eye lifts, breast augmentation or liposuction. Instead, they visited the pickle packer for sure-fire youth-enhancing treatments.

Julius Caesar was so enchanted by Cleo’s formula for strength and beauty he ordered that a plenitude of pickles be on the menu at his orgies and banquets. His troops also benefited from the rage for pickles. They were included in their daily rations. He could have listened to Aristotle who also was an advocate of pickles and spread the word about their benefits for health and stamina.

Queen Victoria was another famous pickle enthusiast. She didn’t bother with pickles as a beauty treatment but she ordered that pickles be at table for every meal. Her zest for pickles also was manifested in her picnic lunches, where they were a part of every outdoor meal.

Our best-known, home-grown pickle proponent, Elvis Presley, had a passion for deep-fried dill pickles. But Elvis was not alone in packing away pickles; his fellow-Americans consume more than 2.5 billion pounds of pickles each year. In case you’re counting, that’s 20 billion pickles. And because it takes almost 4 billion average-sized pickles to reach the moon, all the pickles eaten would reach the moon and back more than twice.

How did the pickle get its name? According to the Encyclopedia of Useless Knowledge, the pickle got its name in the 1300s when English-speaking people mispronounced the name of a Dutch fisherman who specialized in pickling fish. His unpronounceable name, William Beukeiz, supposedly came out: pickle.

The pickle-packing industry in the United States began in 1659, when Dutch farmers in what is now Brooklyn grew cucumbers and sold them to dealers who cured them in barrels and sold them to eager gourmets seeking a pickle fix. In wasn’t until 1820 that pickles were packed in jars. Credit goes to Frenchman Nicholas Appert, who first packed pickles in glass containers.

Pickle history began sometime around 2030 B.C., when inhabitants of northern India brought cucumber seeds to the Tigris Valley. Soon, cucumber vines were sprouting throughout Europe. Shortly thereafter, people learned to preserve the cukes by pickling them in salty brine. By the 17th century, the crunchy munchies made their debut in the New World.

I can’t guarantee that pickles will cure what ails you, but advocates of folk medicine claim that sour pickles help balance the acid-alkaline content of the body and destroy bacteria in the digestive tract.

Surely you must agree that such a prestigious product deserves accolades and recognition. And leave to the folks in Arkansas to have a yearly picklefest. The people in Atkins, Arkansas, are addicted to pickles and each year they pay homage to the sour and sweet by celebrating with a festival where the pickle rules the day.

With so many great pickles on the grocer’s shelf, I don’t expect you to put up your own pickles. To improve the most paltry pickle, here’s a sure-fire recipe to make pickles even more palatable.

CANDIED SWEET PICKLES

Drain juice from a quart of whole sweet pickles or a quart of sweet pickle chips and discard the juice (easiest to use the chips). Cut each pickle lengthwise if using whole pickles. Place the pickles back in the jar and add 1 stick of cinnamon. Combine in a saucepan: 2 cups sugar, 1 cup apple cider, 1 tablespoon celery seed and 2 teaspoons mustard seed. Bring to a boil, stirring until sugar dissolves. Skim the spices from the sugar/vinegar mixture and put into the jar. Pour hot mixture over the pickles. Put the lid on the jar and leave at room temperature. When pickles have cooled, put in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 days before eating. Will keep for several months if refrigerated.