This recipe was inspired by Julie Cooke who was inspired by Rick Stein in his Food Heroes series. I spent all my childhood holidays at Padstow in Cornwall so have a real affinity with the sea and all things Cornish.
I was at one of Julie’s Christmas Pudding making workshops recently and she had a selection of her pickles to buy. I was rather silly and forgot to read all the pickle labels and got caught out eating something that had malt vinegar in it – which of course contains gluten from the barley! The silly thing is I know this and if I was at the supermarket would of course have checked but as I never use malt vinegar when pickling I just didn’t think!
Lesson learnt. Here’s my version using apple cider vinegar.
Ingredients
· 750g small cucumbers, thinly sliced
· 450g onions, thinly sliced
· 1 green pepper, thinly sliced.
· 50g salt
· 350g coconut sugar
· 1/2 tsp turmeric powder
· 1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves
· 1 tablespoon of mustard seeds
· 1/2 tsp celery seeds
· 475 ml apple cider vinegar
Directions
I used a mandolin to slice the onions, cucumber and pepper. Pile them all into a bowl, add the salt and leave to stand for 3 hours. Drain them and rinse under running cold water. Leave them to drain. I pile some weights on top of them to help this process.
Add the remaining ingredients to a large saucepan, bring slowly to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil for 5 minutes.
Add the vegetables to the liquid and again heat slowly to just below boiling point.
Pot into sterilised jars! This amount makes 7 jars. It should keep for around a year – if you can keep your hands off it that long!