Radish Pickles & Preserved Lemons

It’s all about patience for those recipes of radish pickles & preserved lemons! It’s not like it’s everyday – I’m desperately in lack of patience when it comes to have to wait more than a few days or weeks to get a recipe ready -, but being so much into preserved lemons + seeing my buckets list of pickle-based-recipe-idea getting longer and longer, I finally decided to embrace the pickling experience – and suffer in silence for weeks while watching this food still not ready to eat -. As I’m still a novice in the art of pickling, I found some inspiration in Maike Peters‘ cookbook “Eat in my kitchen” that I got for Christmas, and made her preserved lemon recipe. This pickle recipe is really easy to make, cheap and don’t require many ingredients, only a but of patience as you’ll need to wait at least 3 weeks, ideally 4, to be able to use the preserved lemons.

Spending some much time at home those days enabled me to break some personal records of patience in the kitchen: 48h cookie dough, homemade sourdough starter, preserved lemons, radish pickles, red curry paste are among my last achievements. Even though those recipes don’t require an extraordinary experience in cooking processes, they all require something that I still miss in this field, which is a good dose of patience – I mean, when more than one day is needed. Beyond the excitement that you feel when biting into the first dishes once they’re finally ready, I noticed that the fact about waiting for such a long time also strongly increase the pride you get at the end of the process: yay, you can finally eat those sneaky pickles and other recipe components that you drooled on for weeks!

Those 2 recipes of radish pickles & preserved lemons are introducing a couple of spring recipes in which they’ll be used in the next weeks, but they also fits perfectly in a salad or with tapas & snacks, as well as in mediterranean and middle-eastern dishes for the preserved lemons. For people who are too impatient to wait for 1 whole month, be reassured, you can also do express pickling. You can do so with the radish pickles, which only need to marinate for one day before to be ready to eat. More you let them marinate, better it is indeed, but the difference is honestly not transcendent.

Yum

Radish Pickles & Preserved Lemons

Ingredients

FOR THE RADISH PICKLES:

(for a small pot)
About 10 radishes
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup white vinegar
1tbsp sugar
1tsp nigella seeds
1tsp salt

FOR THE PRESERVED LEMONS:

(for a big pot)
5 small organic lemons
The juice of 5 or 6 lemons
70g sea salt

Instructions

TO PREPARE THE RADISH PICKLES
1. Wash and hull radishes, then thinly cut them in slices. Put slices in a clean hermetic pot (Weck or Mason Jar pots are doing a great job!).
2. Mix white vinegar, sugar, salt and nigella seeds together, then pour on the radish slices. Mind that the radishes are all covered with the liquid. Close well the pot.
3. Put in fridge and let marinate for at least 24h. You can store the radish pickles for a few weeks in fridge.
TO PREPARE THE PRESERVED LEMONS
1. Wash and cut the ends of lemons. Lengthwise, make 4 incisions in each lemon. They might go 2/3 deep into the lemons.
2. Scrub some sea salt in each incision, then put lemons in a big hermetic jar, while pushing well. Cover with the remaining sea salt, then extract juice of 5 other lemons and pour it in the jar. Preserved lemons-to-be must be covered by the lemon juice so don't hesitate to use more if it's not enough
3. Press again, then close the jar and store it in a dark place. During the 3-4 first days, open the jar everyday to stir and compress again the lemons. Then you can store the jar for a few weeks in fridge, while opening it from time to time, in order to regularly stir and push them.
4. The preserved lemons are ready to use after 1 month. I usually wash them briefly with cold water before to use them in recipes. You can keep the jar in fridge for a few months.