Hello friends! This post is here to help give you some ideas about how you might participate in this month’s Brassicas and Root Vegetables Community Canning Challenge. If you missed the introductory post last week, you can find it here. Sign up to participate using this form, and join me over at Substack (all challenge related posts will be entirely free) or our Facebook group for topic discussions.
On the food preservation side of the Community Canning Challenge this month, we are focusing on brassicas and root vegetables. These storage friendly crops are widely available in the northern hemisphere this time of year, but given their innate sturdiness, should also be within easy reach if you’re playing along from the southern hemisphere. I really wanted to keep things easy for this first challenge of the year.
Brassica is an official genus designation that includes plants in the cabbage and mustard family. Common representatives of this class include broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi, rutabaga, and turnip. The category of root vegetable is less official and for our preservation purposes, encompasses things like carrots, parsnips, radishes, and beets. Some root vegetables are members of the brassica family, but not all.
These vegetables lend themselves to pickling (either quick or water bathed), fermenting, and pressure canning. Within those categories, there is a wide world of possibilities.
If you’re leaning towards doing a quick pickle (aka a refrigerator pickle), take a quick read through the primer I wrote during the first Mastery Challenge. It’s got a lot of really useful information and offers up a bunch of suggestions on what you might want to quick pickle. I will have a recipe up tomorrow for Health Salad, which is an East Coast deli staple, and is nothing more that quickly pickled sweet and sour cabbage. I don’t have a ton of processed pickles that meet the brief on the blog, but here are a list of recipes from the archives that work for what we’re going for this month.
If you are leaning towards a fermented preserve, here are some more suggestions.
If you don’t like the things on your list, remember that you don’t have to use one of my recipes. There are hundreds of food preservation cookbooks out there and many times more recipes on the internet. Just one word of warning. If you are using a new-to-you pickle recipe and you plan on processing it in a boiling water bath canner, make sure that the vinegar isn’t diluted by more than half and that the recipe contains some salt (without salt, the vinegar struggles to penetrate the vegetables in a timely manner).
I hope that gives you a useful staring place! As always, drop a note in the comments if you have questions.