Seasonal Recipe of the Week
I love pickled green tomatoes and that seems to be something you just can’t get here. So with the killer tomato crop I have on the vine, I am going to make at least one jar of these at the season’s end. It’s easy!
Ingredients
(All these ingredients are per quart of water)
2 tablespoons Kosher salt
1 teaspoon pickling spice
1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds, slightly bruised
1/4 teaspoon black peppercorns, slightly bruised
Handful of stalks of fresh dill, preferably with flower heads and seeds, if not add 1/4 teaspoon dill seed
1 medium unpeeled clove of garlic, slightly flattened
Green tomatoes, hard and firm
Procedure
Sort and rinse the tomatoes and measure them by quarts and put into large, clean, crock or bowl. Pour cold water over tomatoes to cover and keep track of how much water you use. Now take water out and put into a pot and multiply the ingredients in the brine as necessary. Prick each tomato with a fork and return to bowl. To the pot of measured water, add salt, pickling spice, mustard seed, and peppercorns and bring the liquid to a boil. Simmer 5 minutes and then cool completely. Add the dill and the garlic to the tomatoes and cover with the cooked and cooled brine solution. Cover bowl loosely and let stand in a cool spot, 70 degrees is ideal, for 1 –3 weeks. This time depends on their size, and the temperature where they are fermenting. Check daily — if a white scum appears on the surface (it's harmless) skim it off. When the tomatoes are pickled to your taste (you will have to try one) transfer them to clean dry jars, strain some brine over them add a piece of dill from the jar put on lids and refrigerate them.
