WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're making a cold canning batch of bread-and-butter pickles!

Hey, I am Bruce Weinstein and this is the Podcast Cooking with Bruce and Martin.

And I'm Mark s Scarborough. And together with Bruce, we have written three dozen cookbooks. We're publishing our 37th cookbook called Canning, all about small batch, no steam, no pressure, canning. You can make two or three jars of well, what we're about to make in this podcast. Something that in fact is in our house. Every single summer, and he is also in the book Cold Canning. We'll be talking about that when we get to it.

Our one minute cooking tip. Have you ever cracked an egg and gotten a bit of shell in the bowl? Yes. Yes, of course you have. We all have. And it's nearly impossible to get it out with your fingers. You just push that piece of shell around. It's so ugh. Unless you wet your finger. A wet finger goes right through the egg white and that piece of shell will stick to your wet finger. Really? You could slide it up the side of the bowl and get rid of it. Really? Yep. Really? I

Okay. Wait. I have never. Tried this and I don't know this. Yep, yep. Wet fingers. You wet your finger and then it goes right through the egg whites. Okay? So this can't be, you're just using the egg whites to whip them because that would be putting water into them. So you can't do this trick. If you want those egg whites, that's somehow amount of shells gotten in them and you intend to make miran.

You also don't want your finger in there 'cause you have oils on your finger. This is just your cracking eggs into a bowl because you're gonna, so you're gonna scramble them or something. Scramble them or fry them. But you get a somehow. But unfortunately you get some shell in the bowl. So you want to get the shell out. Wet. Your finger goes right down to the bottom and the shell sticks to it. Huh?

And I, I wanna know, I wanna say how I know you're a chef. I know you're a chef because you talked about cracking an egg into a bowl before you fry it. And I don't think anyone listening to this podcast does that. I do it because I married you and I've learned to do it. But before I fry an egg, I crack it into a bowl, and then I slip it from the bowl into the skillet because I've watched Bruce do it. But before I ever was with Bruce, I never did such a thing.

and what happens if you get the shell in the skillet? I don't know. You just eat it. Come on. That's gross. That's like sand in your salad. Gross. I don't know. You just eat it. Okay.

Before we get to making a recipe, we're heading to the kitchen in this episode to make a recipe for something that makes me very, very happy and that I demand demand outta Bruce every summer. Me say that it would be great if you could rate this podcast, if you could subscribe to it, if you could write a review. All those ways are, are the ways that you can help us maintain the podcast in a very crowded podcast landscape. We appreciate that.

in high school they told you you would use this in adult. I know, and

I assure you that when I took the point of going, I got to the point in math where we did algorithms. I thought no one is ever, ever, ever using this unless there's. Some nerdy engineer, and now in fact, it dominates all our lives. Oh, well,

This is a recipe for bread and butter pickles that Mark and I first created for a cooking light article on pickling over years ago. Remember, magazines. Hmm. I remember, remember

writing for gourmet?

Yeah.

Bon Appetit. Remember this stuff and writing so much for fine cooking. Remember that? Mm-hmm. Yep. God, I, I, okay. Here's a little bit of trivia about us. We could never crack food and wine.

No we couldn't. No we could

not.

Now, Tina u Lockey was the food editor and I don't know what she had against us, but she never, I don't know she had anything against us.

Oh, come on. It's not against you. It's just we never cracked it. We never got the right article idea to her. At the right second, we got Wine Spectator. I know. We became

their travel correspondent in France.

In Day Wine Spectator was considered the roughest of the rough crack 'cause it was such an old boys club. Mm-hmm. Together. And we cracked. That and became, as Bruce says, a travel writing pair for Wine Spectator about, uh, food and wine. I don't know, it just escaped us. We couldn't make it happen. Mm-hmm. No matter how hard we tried, but we were contributing editors to cooking light and to eating well. We were columnists longest serving columnists on weight watchers.com. Oh my gosh.

okay, before we recorded this, I took one pound or 450 grams of pickling Kirbys, those small pickling cucumbers, and I sliced them into half inch rings, circles, you know, even sized discs. And I put them in a big bowl with one tablespoon or 12 grams of kosher salt. I let, that's pretty

thick. Yep. Let me just say. Half an inch is not a paper thin slice. No. You

want these to have some bite and body, so that's,

that's a little bit, uh, smaller than a centimeter, but you're getting near a centimeter. Yeah. It's not a, it's a little smaller than a centimeter.

You want you chunky pieces. Also, they've been sitting now with the salt in a large bowl for an hour and a half, and they've got. A lot of liquid in this bowl. So they've shrunk a bit, they've given off liquid, and what I'm doing now is I am draining these in a large colander and I am going to rinse them really, really well.

Okay. So while he's rinsing those salted Kirbys, which we've done to get rid of that excess liquid, as he says, because that will make our brine. Boggy as these cucumber bits sit in it. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna slice up a yellow onion and listen. It depends on how much onion you like. I've got a medium one here. You can use a large yellow onion. You can use a small one. The onion just adds a little sweet aromatic flavor behind the pickles. It's not the main point here.

Okay. No, do not try and cut pin slices that have a roundy rollie. Anything? No, never. Okay, so we've got this. We can make a B right now. We need a brine because all pickles have a brine, and

before you say what's gonna go in the brine, it's gonna go into Medium suspect. Let say that this recipe's available on our website cooking with Bruce and mark.com or Bruce and mark.com. It is a recipe from Cold Canning, but it's also available there. You can find it under this podcast episode, or there's a list of recipes on our website, and you can find it right there amongst all the recipes for these bread and butter pickle, as well as a gorgeous photographs.

quarters of a cup or 180 milliliters of plain white distilled vinegar. That's just no white wine vinegar.

That's just plain old white. Yep. Bad vinegar.

Three quarters of a cup or 150 grams of white sugar. Plain old granulated white sugar.

Can I stop you and talk about white vinegar for a minute? Sure. Because I'm so obsessed with this. So for. All of my life. All of your life, all of anyone's life. White vinegar was 5%. Acidity. 5%, 5%, 5%. In the last two years, manufacturers have dropped the percent and distill white vinegar is now often sold at 4% acidity, which is no good for shelf stable canning. It's a whole. Huge problem. It's fine by us because we're gonna put these in the fridge. Mm-hmm.

Yep. And one quarter cup of 60 milliliters of apple cider vinegar, which usually is at 5% acidity. We have three tablespoons with 39 grams of. Dark brown sugar. Yep. Same three tablespoons, but 30 grams of brown mustard seeds.

And you probably notice if you listen to our podcast about brown, are much hotter than yellow mustard seeds. Mm-hmm. So these are gonna take the top of your head off if you don't want the top of your head taken off. And trust me, there's not a lot here. If you don't, you can drop. The amount slightly here, even down to two tablespoons or 20 grams. But we like it a little bit spicier.

And we got one teaspoon, which is about 10 grams of yellow mustard seeds. Yeah. The less spicy variety. Mm-hmm. A quarter teaspoon of celery seeds and just an eighth of a teaspoon of ground cloves and an eighth of a teaspoon of ground turmeric. These are all going into a medium sauce pan over a high heat. Right. And I'm stirring until it dissolves. And we are gonna bring these. Just to the barest simmer.

Now here's, here's, here's the problem, and this is a shortcut cheap thing as we've used ground clubs and ground turmeric, and will it cloud the brine? Yes. Slightly, it will slightly cloud the brine, and old school canners will freak out because we can put a whole clove in there, et cetera,

or fresh turmeric,

right? We're doing this for the ease of the process and it makes it so much easier to use ground cloves and ground turmeric, and. Also, we're making a small batch, so we should be as easy as we can be. So bruises, put this on the stove in this medium. So pan, he stirred it until that sugar dissolves. It dissolves pretty quickly. Yep. And if you've got it at medium high heat to high heat, it's gonna come up to a boil pretty fast. You just wanna stir it every once in a while.

Yep. So the thing is, why do they call these bread and butter pickles? I mean, that's always the phrase used for pickles that are sweet. And vinegar. Are you kidding? But why are they called bread and butter pickles? You really don't know. I have. Are you being serious with me? You don't know. Oh my God. I'm being serious with you. Okay,

well please let the southerner teach you something. There you go. You eat them on a slice of buttered bread. You,

I thought I ate it. I thought I ate it on a piece of smoked brisket or something. No. Well,

you can. They're delicious On smoked. They also good. Sandwich, of course, they're delicious on all those things, but many of us grew up eating buttered sandwiches, and that means lunch and meat on bread with butter, not mayonnaise and not mustard. I know it's so not the modern world. And these were the pickles that you put in that sandwich with the butter on the red.

Now bread and butter pickles are only good when they're crunchy and fresh. Made bread and butter pickles like these, which don't get processed, which get put in your fridge. Stay crunchy. What I don't understand are all those shelf stable jars of bread and butter, pickles at the supermarket. Mushy. That are mushy. Yeah, mushy. Who wants mushy pickles? Well,

we're doing a pinch, but they're not, no, they won't as good. I don't understand, and I wanna say that. Uh, this, once we get this all done and it's, it's about up to a boil, but once we get this thing up to a boil and Bruce does what he's gonna do next, um, this stuff will keep in the fridge for about a month. Honestly, we keep it all summer long, but let's go by, use D standards, which is a month. It'll keep in the, in the freezer indefinitely, but it will.

It's the same thing that happens if you were to process them. Right? So this is best just in the fridge. Okay. So I had those rinsed cucumbers with the onions, and I'm putting those into a one. Quat ball canning drawer, a regular old canning drawer, which has not been sterilized. It has not been boiled. It has been cleanly washed in hot water, so it is nice and clean, and those cucumbers went in there and now I'm taking the brine off the stove and I am pouring it. Over the cucumbers.

You can, there are canning funnels you can use that are wide mouth that you can sit inside the jar and just pour through. But if you have a steady hand, you can get this right into the jar. Let me advise you to set the jar with the cucumbers and the in the sink so that. If you do spill any of this, it ends up in the sink and you can just easily clean it up rather than all over your counter. Mm-hmm. Or your floor. And by the way, you're working with a super hot solution here of sugar and vinegar.

You know what this reminds me of when I eat these kind of pickles, it reminds me of when we go to Korean. Fried chicken places. Yes. And I get the chicken moo. Yes. The sweet pickled radish.

Not everybody's gonna know what chicken mo is. So

moo is the Korean word for radish and chicken Moo is the pickled radish you serve with fried chicken. And it's a sweet and vinegary pickled radish and called chicken moo. And that's sort of like Korean bread and

butter pickles sort of, except this has all the mustard seeds. Mm-hmm. And this is much. No offense to Korean cuisine, but this is much more sophisticated. It is. It's, it's got a wild aroma to it and an herbal flavor. It's more complex flavor. I love bread and butter pickles. I can't imagine a summer without them. So why would I make these? Well, Bruce has got this thing here. As we say, we're gonna set it out on the counter for an. Then we're gonna cover it. We're gonna refrigerate it.

to come and ripen and become beautiful and at which point you compile them on sandwiches.

Pile them on burgers. I love them on hummus. I love to buy hummus from the store and spoon up some of these with the brine on top of the hummus.

Mm. I love them on a salami sandwich. That was, that

was something like, they're great on a salami sandwich. Mm-hmm. They're great on burgers, they're great on dogs. They're great with brats. They're of course great with. Anything from a barbecue, whether you make it yourself or buy it from a barbecue restaurant, brisket, pulled pork, ribs, all those things, they're perfect with them. Um, let me also say, this is weird, but if you put them with sour cream on a baked potato, they are pretty Oh, sure. Why not? Fine. On sour cream, on a baked potato.

them up. Put them in

chicken salad. Yep. Put them in egg salad.

Yep. Oh my God. There's so much you could do

with this. There is so much you can do with this, and in fact, the brine that this is in, if you stick a tablespoon in it and don't pick up any of the spices, but just use the brine. You can add a tiny bit of this brine to dressings. You can use it as a marinade. Mm-hmm. When you're finally done with this whole. Big jar of bread and butter pickles.

grill them and they're sweet again. They can't sit in

this brine more than an hour or two, or they'll get mushy, but uh, an hour right in the fridge, they're perfect. Also works

with center cut boneless pork chops. Yep, they're great. That's a great idea to use this sugary brine syrup.

Yep. Again, let me just say that this recipes on our website is of course in the book called Canning. We hope that you'll take a look at that book. It's up on Amazon or at retailers across the country, or if you want to avoid Amazon at. Bookshop, which is the independent, uh, books sellers website. You can find the book all over the place. It's coming out at the end of July. Uh, it's got, oh my gosh, how many recipes? Four, four hundred and twenty

five. Recipes,

4 25 like this. That makes small batches of things that you need and you're alive that

you can do in real time without a lot of work and no big pots of boiling water. Oh my gosh. And no processing blackberry

conserve. Is worth the admission to the book. Mm-hmm. But that's a for another matter. Okay. So that's our making bread and butter pickles. We appreciate your being a part of this journey with us and cooking along with us in your car or wherever you are right now.

I did. So they were in the pantry and they will stay there until we opened them all and eat them all, or give them to people. You know, the trick when you make rhubarb Jam is a. Tiny, tiny little bit of vanilla. It is because vanilla just balances with rhubarb so Well. It's the, but you can

overpower it. It's the trick of, uh, rhubarb pie. Mm. Not strawberry rhubarb pie, but rhubarb pie. Uh, just, I mean, uh, like a half a teaspoon of vanilla, it balances out the rhubarb beautifully, and yet preserves all that fabulous sour flavor.

Mm-hmm. Mm mm mm What's making me happy in food this week are pecan brownies.

Oh, right. Oh gosh. I made a batch

of gluten-free pecan brownies to bring to my knitting workshop. So say what you did. 'cause it's fascinating. So I taught a knitting workshop, um, at a local library, and

I don't know that, that's so fascinating. I

met

the recipe, but come on. Yeah. So I

ground up a cup of. Pecans and I then into the food process where I ground them. I put some salt and I put, I put some salt and I put cocoa powder and I let that all just go together. And then I beat eggs and sugar and I used duck eggs 'cause we have all these local farms in us and I beat duck eggs and sugar until it was big and fluffy and. Thick and white and I mixed in the chocolate nut mixture.

They were super, I had a sneak bite before you took them to the knitting group. And they were super fudgy. Mm-hmm. Very collapsed. Mm-hmm. Uh, with a crunchy, crackly top. And so nutty it was. All those lovely pecans in there. Round pecans. We are lucky enough that we have a friend from Texas who sends us a gallon jug of mm-hmm.

up. That was all

used up in those brownies. I think they're all gone now. The ladies at the workshop loved them. They, oh man. I grew up with fresh pecans from my grandparents on their farm, and I love pecan. Anything is enough for me. Okay, so that's the podcast for this week. We appreciate your. Being with us. We appreciate your being on this journey and choosing us out of the vast array of podcasts out there that we know there is a billion podcasts out there and we appreciate your being here with us.

And every week here we tell you what's making us happy in food. So please go to our Facebook group, also called Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and tell us what's making you happy in food this week. 'cause we are interested in what is happening in your kitchen. What's happening on your plate and what you're eating and loving, and if it's really good, we might even try it and talk about it here on cooking with Bruce and Mark.