Bread 'n' butter jalepeños

Bread 'n' butter pickles were always my dad's favorite, and while I was partial to dill growing up, I've more recently developed an appreciation for things more amenable to his palate.

Last fall a coworker of mine had a get-together out at his farm and, also being a fan of chiles, had some of these goodies out to go with his stewed beans and cornbread and what-all that everyone else brought  (I made butterscotch chip oatmeal cookies).

Fortunately for me, my coworker had a load of fresh jalepeños that were going to go bad before he could eat them all, and knowing I was the biggest aficionado of fiery comestibles there after himself, he let me take them home.

Fresh peppers are great, but there were a lot, and I had to try my hand at bread 'n' butter peppers.

Fortunately I currently reside near Muncie, Indiana, so canning supplies are still relatively easy to find.  I didn't do a real canning job on the peppers, the directions I was given by my coworker started with "You don't actually have to can the peppers," but it was as close to my memories of my mom making pickles and grape juice and chile sauce as I could get without deliberately going all-out.

I started with 1-2 quarts of whole, fresh peppers; most still green, some obviously ripe.  I chopped off the stems and ran them through my food processor with the coarsest slicing blade.  From what I recall of Alton Brown's lesson on the subject, the capsaicin glands tend to be up at the stem end of the inside of the pepper, and I wanted to preserve those while eliminating the stemmy woodiness endemic to most fruits.

As you know now, I'll generally err on the side of convenience when trying something new, and then compare it afterwards to a more old fashioned or purist or honest method of preparation.  The same holds here:  I got some Ball bread & butter pickle mix and followed the instructions.  Much easier than finding a recipe for the brine, making sure I had all the ingredients, and then doing research on canning or hoping to find a close-enough procedure already published somewhere.  Since I knew I didn't have to go through all that trouble anyway, I just followed a rough outline of the instructions on the mix jar.  I won't give you a blow by blow, but here's the rundown:

1. Place a half gallon jar in a stock pot and fill with water until the jar is full and the stock pot is as close to full as you dare. Put on high heat until it boils. Mainly I wanted to reduce thermal shock at step 4.
2. Combine white vinegar, the mix, but no sugar (the mix has dextrose and there's enough sugar in today's foods anyway--but if you like 'em sweet, don't let me stop you) in a saucepan and bring to a boil.
3. When everything's boiling, find a way to safely drain the jar, and then fill it with the sliced peppers.
4. Pour the boiling acid-brine over the peppers, close the lid, and let it steep. At first some of the peppers will not want to submerge, so after the jar cooled a bit (let it cool on the kitchen counter for a while--don't put hot food in your refrigerator), I inverted the jar for a few hours a couple times. I probably didn't need to, the peppers "cooked" and settled well enough on their own in a day or so, but it didn't seem like it would have hurt.

If I were making pickled eggs I'd leave them alone for a few more weeks, but since the peppers already have a lot of flavor and a much higher surface area to volume ratio, they looked ready to eat inside of a week.  Oh yes, they were, gloriously so.

Tangy, sweet, still hot but not rudely so.  Yum!  Great as a condiment on hamburgers, or as a side with beans or in soup.

But I had an epiphany or two while I was waiting for the water to boil.  I'll get back to you when I've had a chance to do some research, but let me give you a preview.

First, why are we only using white vinegar?  Acetic acid has a tangy sourness and a pungency that aren't objectionable, at least at culinary concentrations, but that's like saying sugar is sweet--it's nothing else, and most people with sweet teeth would prefer some kind of candy with particular flavors to spoonfuls of table sugar or prescription strength fructose.

I sometimes use a malt or red wine vinegar as part of a marinade, or a sauce or fond, and it's an important part of vinaigrette dressings.  I'm finding more canned tuna packed in olive oil and even infused with garlic, so I could empty a can of that stuff over a bed of lettuce and be halfway to salad dressing; so why not put some veggies I might have in the pickled condition into a salad, that have been macerated with a nice pinot noir vinegar instead of some corporate brine?  I'll let you know.

I've gotta tell you, though, that pinot noir vinegar?  I could drink that like scotch.  Brilliant.

Second, why use only bread 'n' butter mix, or sugar for sweet pickles, or dill and garlic for dill pickles? I'm using "pickles" as shorthand for any pickled vegetables at this point, natch.  I'm looking at the ingredients on this jar and it's basically salt, spices, and sugar.  Oh, lookee at this other jar also containing salt, "spices," and sugar...maybe, with a respectable dry barbecue rub like this one and perhaps a hit of Liquid Smoke, we could have some barbecue pickles.... I'll let you know.