Thanks to westcoastseeds.com for the visual.
One in a while they have things at Fellenz Family Farms CSA in quantities I am not entirely sure of using. Yes, I like daikon, but, hey, they came in a bag of three large ones. So, what was I to do once I took them home? After letting them sit around looking sad, I decided to go with my new obsession and pickle them.
First: What is a daikon? It is (as pictured above) a large, longish, thick, white radish. While I think of it as quite tangy, I think I was wrong - it is fairly mild, and goes by various names including Japanese radish. It is, of course, a root vegetable. Here's a site for the many ways you can use these darn things. Rumor has it, alas known as google indicates that, there are various health benefits associated with them as well. The health benefits include the ubiquitous notion that the right foods can boost your immune system.)
Second: There are many ways to pickle them. One can pickle them so they turn red or yellow. (For hello, one uses turmeric. For red, I think a bit of beet - or there are some fancy though dubious-seeming to me, dyes.) One can pickle them following recipes labeled korean, japanese, and many other (usually asian) ethnicities. And, one can pickle them in various shapes -- cut into logs, cut into cubes, or sliced into rounds.
Third: I chose to pickle them in rounds, following a pickling recipe that involves turmeric. Hence, the pickles pictured here are yellow.
These are refrigerator pickles in the sense that they last one month and require no water processing (though I assume if I had felt like it that might have made them last longer?). In any case, once peeled and sliced into rounds, one immerses these in the pickling brine described below and allows them to cool in the broth for 1-2 hours (according to the recipe with a paper towel over the top of the brine itself. I did this. I have no idea why.)
Here's the brine recipe (from here) - basically just put all this in a pan and boil then add the radishes -- the turmeric stains so be careful. These are Danmuji -- aka Korean spiced pickled daikon.
1.5 cups water
1.5 cups unseasoned rice vinegar
.5 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 medium cloves garlic (i used one large cut in half)
15 whole black pepper corns
2 bay leaves
Fourth: Any evaluation? Not yet. They look lovely, but I have only tried one which was because I could not quite fit them all into the (wide mouthed) jars I chose. It was delicate and tasty but . . . not as spicy as I had hoped? Hurrah, though, for local ingredients -- the daikon themselves!
Have you pickled daikon? Your favorite recipe?
