Pickling with spices
Also called spiced pickling, achar, escabeche
Quick answer
Preserving vegetables, fruit or fish in vinegar, brine or oil with whole spices, which extract slowly into the pickling liquid over days and weeks.
What it does to spices
Pickling is the slowest infusion in the kitchen. Whole spices sit in vinegar, brine or oil for weeks, giving up their aroma gradually and evenly, which is why pickling spice is kept whole and why the result tastes integrated rather than dusty. The medium decides what is extracted: vinegar and brine carry water-soluble compounds and some aroma, oil carries the fat-soluble ones — the reason South Asian oil pickles taste so powerfully of mustard, fenugreek and fennel. Ground spices cloud a brine and can turn it muddy and bitter over time.
Why it works
Acid and salt draw water out of the food and stop spoilage; the spices, held in the liquid at room or fridge temperature, release their aroma by slow diffusion rather than by heat. Because the process runs for weeks, even slowly extracting whole spices give up most of their character, and strongly flavoured ones such as cloves can come to dominate.
How it goes wrong
- Using ground spices in a clear brine, which clouds and darkens it.
- Over-spicing a long pickle with cloves or allspice, whose eugenol grows more dominant with time.
Spices it matters for
- Mustard seed — In South Asian oil pickles and in pickling spice.
- Dill seed — Dill pickles and pickled cabbage.
- Chilli flakes
- Cloves
- Fenugreek — In Indian mango and lime pickles.
- Jalapeño — Pickled as escabeche.
What it is called
The same technique in the traditions that use it, each named in its own terms.
Achar
South Asian
Oil-and-spice pickles, often matured in the sun.
Escabeche
Spanish and Latin American
Vinegar pickles of chillies, vegetables or fried fish.
Where it is used
The pairings that specifically call for this technique.
- Jalapeño with lemon — Acid sharpens a green chilli rather than cooling it, and it is what keeps a raw salsa or a pickled jalapeño from tasting flat. Escabeche — jalapeños pickled with carrot and onion — is the preparation this pairing exists for.
- Dill seed with cabbage — A Northern and Eastern European standing pair, and it is really a pairing with fermentation as much as with the vegetable. Cabbage is sulphurous and, once soured, sharply acidic; the carvone in dill seed cuts through both and adds a warmth that keeps a plate of sauerkraut or braised cabbage from reading as merely sour.
- Chilli flakes with cloves — They co-occur in pickling spice and in several long-braised dishes, and the relationship is real but narrow: eugenol is warm and slightly numbing, capsaicin is hot and building, and in a brine or a braise the clove rounds the heat. In anything quick the clove simply reads as medicinal against the chilli.
Questions this page answers
- which spices to use for pickling
- whole or ground spices in pickles
- spices in indian achar