Slow Food Fast

What goes into a classic felafel pita? Tomato/cucumber diced salad, yes. Chopped or shredded cabbage or Greek-style lahanosalata–maybe. Hummus and tehina–of course.  Dab of z’khug, harissa, salat turqi and other medium-hot red pepper condiments, up to you. Olives? if Greek-style and not the black rubbery cheap flavorless American ones from a can. “Chipsim” (aka, chips or French fries)–not my thing but okay as long as they’re fresh and crisp, not soggy or lukewarm.  Hilbe–a sour fenugreek-based sauce something like mustard dressing.

And pickled eggplants. The true pickles for felafel, if you ask me. You can probably find them in cans in Arab and Armenian groceries or online, but they’re pretty full-on brined and have a lot of the same deficits of both commercial cucumber-type pickles and canned vegetables. Lot of salt, a bit metallic from the cans, and a little less than fresh. Plus with cans, you have to either use them up all in one go (at your huge felafel party) or else store the unused pickles in a fresh nonreactive container in the fridge. Which isn’t necessarily that big a sacrifice, if you’re really into them, have a lot of takers to share them with, and/or are planning to eat leftover felafel for the rest of the week (month?) But fresh-made eggplant pickles are a lot better if you just want them for a meal or two, or you want to control the salt level so you don’t wake up the next day with swollen ankles and fingers like cucumbers.

Classic pickles are made with the little finger-sized eggplants like the ones I used for Syrian stuffed eggplants a few years ago or else with long, thin eggplants sliced crosswise. But regular large ones will also work, cut into bite-size pieces.

If you have fresh eggplants of whatever size, you can pickle them in one of two ways, depending on your patience level. The first is your basic half-sour pickles fermented in a couple of days to a week in a mason or canning jar on a counter–much the same as for half-sour kosher dill pickles or pickled green tomatoes but maybe without the dill. When I lived in Israel back in the ’80s, I was surprised to see jars of eggplant fingers pickling on many people’s home kitchen counters. It seemed so Mediterranean-idyllic to me, coming straight out of a mainstream college town in the days before wholesale foodieism. For eggplant, as for the green tomatoes and cucumbers, use a standard salt and distilled vinegar brine that you’ve boiled and cooled, and pour it over the eggplant chunks and flavorings in the jar. Instead of dill, throw some well-scrubbed organic lemon slices and small whole dried hot peppers into the jar with the halved garlic cloves and whole coriander seed, pack the raw eggplant slices in tightly, and pour the brine over before capping the jar and letting it sit to ferment a couple of days. You’re not going to process these in a hot water bath, so keep them in the fridge and use them within a week or so.

However…there is a much faster way to get to pickled eggplant heaven in about 5 minutes–microwave marinating. If you just want a few right now, you want eggplant pickles that taste fresher and have lower salt, or you’ve never tasted them before and you’re not sure what you’ll think of them, a microwave will get you a reasonably small taster batch in about 5 minutes flat, and you can make them in a snaplock container that goes straight to the fridge once it’s cooled down. The taste and texture are both surprisingly authentic, based on my last two tries.

Why would you bother pickling an eggplant instead of cooking it, anyway? Well…I had a big eggplant that I hadn’t gotten around to using for a week. It was developing soft brown spots in places and I wasn’t sure was really going to make it much longer if I didn’t get on and do something with it, but I thought it was probably now too tough for straight eating–eggplants get tougher and sometimes more bitter inside as they age. So I cut off the spots on the peel and started slicing the rest into small wedges to see if I could do a quick version of eggplant pickles in the microwave and get somewhere close.

I’ve done it before with mild hot peppers (and occasionally, accidentally, with peppers that turned out not to be mild) and sometime this past year I tried it with a couple of green tomatoes too, despite having made pretty good deli-style pickled green tomatoes the official way a few years ago. The microwave tomatoes came out basically identical to the two-day jar-fermented version, which surprised me. So I can say with confidence that this microwave method seems mostly good.

But here’s the tricky bit.

When you microwave in a brine, you have to work out how soft or crisp you want the vegetables to be, and play around with the microwaving times and what you put in when so that you cook the vegetables just enough and let the brine penetrate, but not so much as to end up with limp mush. The hot vinegar and/or lemon juice will also “cook” and discolor some vegetables more than others. Commercial operations offset these and other problems by adding sodium metabisulfite, alum, and other tricky preservatives and texturizers at various stages, but they’re not easy to obtain for home use and can be dangerous if mishandled. I’m pretty sure they don’t actually improve the taste.

It’s both easier and a lot safer–not to mention cheaper–to play around a bit and figure out a microwave method that gets you where you want to be or at least close. Because you can. Of course you can.

Here are a couple of strategies for microwave-pickling depending on the kind of vegetable you have and what texture you’re aiming for, and then we’ll look at what I did with the eggplant slices.

Microwave Marinating Combinations

Do you want to microwave the veg and brine ingredients together, all in one step, and let the brine cook the vegetable? That works well for things like marinated artichoke hearts or sweet and sour red cabbage. You could do that as a first try and see if you like the texture, adding a bit of time if it’s not cooked enough for you or cutting back the next time if the veg is too soft. Easy enough.

But you can also adjust which part cooks more, the veg or the brine. You know at some point you’re going to have vegetables in a container with brine and a lid, but the order and degree of cooking are up to you.

You might want to parcook thick and/or tough vegetables alone first, either by microwaving as-is on an open plate or by steaming them in a lidded container with a little water, to soften and make them more absorbent before draining and adding the brine ingredients, and then heat everything together to marinate and flavor it, which will cook the vegetable a little more too. If you don’t want it to cook or soften further, you could pour cooled brine over the hot veg and let it marinate–incidentally, this is what you’re supposed to do with the sliced cooked potatoes in a salade niçoise.

If you have a vegetable you want to stay reasonably crisp, like Anaheim or Hungarian peppers, or maybe okra or carrots or cauliflower, you might want to heat the brine by itself first, add the raw veg, then microwave just a minute or so further, to get it just crisp-tender and with (hopefully) a little less discoloration. This is what I did with the green tomatoes–I wanted them still firm. You might even taste-test the lightly-marinated veg and decide to remove it from the brine to keep more of the color and texture if you’re serving it right away and not storing it.

Or let’s say you have a tricky vegetable–tough eggplant with an easily discolored peel. Now what? You don’t want it cooked to mush, but you don’t want it too chewy or spongy. You don’t want it any uglier than you can help and you want to avoid bitterness (actually, the brine will help a lot with this).

Back to the eggplant

I decided to presteam my eggplant wedges with a drizzle of water in a lidded container for a couple of minutes until just barely tender and unspongy but not fully cooked and collapsed as you’d want for baba ghanouj. I drained off the brown liquid that came out. Then I made a minimal amount of brine–a few tablespoons of water, a few tablespoons of vinegar, about half and half, with a dash of salt, not full-on pickle strength but more like what I add for marinated artichoke hearts, maybe a quarter-teaspoon or a bit less. A clove of garlic scored a few times in one end with a paring knife or else cut into a couple of big chunks. A few whole coriander seeds. A good squeeze of lemon. A drizzle of olive oil too–not a lot, a spoonful, just enough to avoid “rubber vegetable” syndrome. A few more minutes in the microwave with the brine, stopping and testing every minute or two so I could catch it before it started going obviously mushy–I wanted it to keep a little bite.

I also thought about whether it would discolor badly. As with red cabbage, pink tinges are perfectly good; olivey-green or blue-gray, the product of any alkaline substances like baking soda, would be not so nice. But the marinated eggplant didn’t seem to do more than glow a little pink/magenta where the purple from the peel was starting to steep into the brine. The vinegar and lemon in the brine seem to have done me right, and the texture of the finished eggplant pickles held up nicely in the fridge over the next few days.

So unless you’re really trying to be picturesque with a jar of eggplant pickles fermenting authentically on your countertop, microwave is the way to go.

These pickled eggplant wedges aren’t just for felafel, though. As with pickled Anaheim peppers or green tomatoes, they make a nice and not-so-common addition to a summery Mediterranean-style spread with salads, olives, marinated gigantes or other beans, grilled fish or meat, roasted peppers and onions, and of course, good bread.

B’te’avon, mangia bene, bon appétit, eat nice–etc. Take advantage of summer produce wherever you can and let your microwave help out.

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PS–I’m going to take the opportunity, given the headlines today: If you haven’t gotten your Covid vaccination yet, keep a cool head, take a deep breath, be brave and do it–the risks are extremely low and the effectiveness of these vaccines is incredibly high compared to things like a flu shot. The pharmacy or clinic techs will do it right and they’ll also make sure you don’t have an allergic reaction before they let you go. Pfizer, Moderna and J&J have all been tested in millions of arms by now, and the results are about as close to a miracle as we’re ever going to get, maybe even on par with the polio vaccine. You can actually see the difference happening day by day on any major news organization’s (well, maybe not Fox) infection tracking maps: states and regions where vaccination rates are high have plummeting infection rates. States that aren’t encouraging vaccination or are making it harder to get are still seeing rises in infections and deaths. Message, hopefully loud and clear and obvious: Getting the vaccine can save your life. It could save your child’s life. It can stop new variants before they really take off and give us all yet another year of lockdowns and misery. Be brave, be smart, vote with your feet and get on with it, especially if you value your freedom and the freedom of your neighbors.

Filed under: appetizers, cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cooking, food, Middle Eastern cooking, recipes |