The latest pickling experiment underway: dilly beans made with thawed-out commercial frozen green beans!
It seemed worth a try. You need to blanch fresh green beans for a few minutes anyway, to neutralize weird bean chemicals. Those are already blanched, and they stay crispy enough that it might work.
I haven't tried any from fresh green beans in years, and...that never turned out well before. Every batch I have made before molded on the top. Probably because the blanching does essentially pasteurize them, wiping out the natural lactobacteria hitching a ride on basically any kind of produce.
One way to get around this, I guess: mix things up!
how to make old fashioned pickled beans and corn in a crock
I have certainly known people to pickle corn and beans separately, but never together like that. Guessing that probably is an extremely old combination, for some people. Throw in some squash, and you'd have some Three Sisters mixed pickles.
My Nana regularly did make dilly beans alongside the crocks of kraut and brine dill cucumbers. Guess she really liked that flavor profile too. No idea how she kept the beans from molding.
My original workaround thought was to try laying maybe a cabbage leaf in on top, as good as it is at fermenting itself. They're also great to help keep anything else from floating up to mold.
But, I decided to go one up this time, and fish a donor starter piece of leaf out of the last still-working batch! I had enough already out, so that jar got a couple of layers anyway. Plenty to go around.
I had expected the radish skins to leach a bunch of color, but not enough to turn the brine so pink!
That hopping active cabbage did almost immediately cloud up the top of the new brine. Taking that as a promising sign
Otherwise, that's got fairly standard dill pickle type seasonings. I did throw in another of those little frozen homegrown chiles, a big clove of garlic halved, and a pretty big sprig of fresh dill tucked down in the middle. Since I'm using dill from the store and don't have any seed heads, I also threw some dill seeds in the bottom with the peppercorns, mustard seeds, allspice, bay leaf, and a few of those nice Assam tea leaves for extra tannins to help keep things crispy.
Now in what I suppose is turning into the Pickle Drawer. I guess we'll see how this turns out. With any luck, it (a) won't go moldy, and (b) won't turn too strange a texture. I'll be counting this as a success if it does manage to meet those criteria. But, we'll see.
