When I first moved to Amherst, I discovered La Veracruzana: a Mexican restaurant that had a salsa bar. Included in the salsa bar was something they called “escabeche.” I had never seen it before: a mix of pickled onions, carrots, and jalapeños. It was delicious. I would always get some whenever I ordered from the restaurant. Our grocery stories didn’t have anything like it, so it was something I could only get at this one restaurant.
If you look up escabeche, the word often refers to a dish like ceviche, with fish or meat prepared in an acidic solution, which causes the proteins to denature — like they’ve been cooked — but without killing the bacteria or parasites, like cooking would. Brrr! No thank you.
Several years ago, I noticed at our local farm stand that the jalapeños and carrots get ripe at the same time. Aha! I thought. I wondered how hard it would be to make my own escabeche. Every year, I would see the jalapeños and carrots and think, “I should look up a recipe and try it.” But never would.
This year, I discovered that Walmart carries huge cans of escabeche — for cheap. Walmart caters to the migrant farm workers that come to Hadley to cultivate and harvest their cash crops. Walmart has bilingual signage and a lot specialty Hispanic goods and seem to have locked up that market. The escabeche is good too!
Still, when I saw the carrots and jalapeños at the farm stand this year, I decided it had to be now or never. So I went ahead and and bought two bunches of carrots, four boxes of jalapeños, and some mason jars. Then I started looking at recipes.
I should have looked at the recipes first. It turns out that most of them only keep for 2-3 weeks because they’re not really “canned”. I guess I’m going to be eating a lot of escabeche really fast.
I looked at a bunch of recipes. They’re all similar, but with minor differences. Interpolating, I tried to craft my own.
Here’s what I used for my first batch:
- 2 cups water
- 3 cups distilled white vinegar
- 1/3 cup white sugar
- 1/3 cup kosher salt
- fresh jalapeños (quartered), carrots (sliced), and red onions (halved and sliced)
- spoonful of garlic
- 2 bay leaves
I put the jars in an inch of boiling water to sterilize them.
I mixed the water, vinegar, salt, and sugar and brought it to a gentle boil.
I chopped up the vegetables and packed the jars (I should have packed them tighter).
I filled the jars with the boiling pickling brine and sealed them up.
Then I let them cool and put them in the refrigerator. I waited about 24 hours before opening one.
Today I tried the first one. It was good! It’s not the same as the really pickled stuff, but delicious. It’s a total success.
I may try some of the additional wrinkles I’ve seen some recipes use. Some cook the vegetables lightly first. Some use a mixture of distilled and apple-cider vinegar. One uses orange juice as a sweetener. But I’m quite pleased with the results so far.
To be honest, after these experiments, I’ll probably just go buy the canned stuff. It’s hard to beat $1.78. Even one basket of fresh jalapeños cost $2.50. But it’s always fun to try making stuff yourself.