Saving frozen green beans with fermented pickles
Another express recipe to save frozen vegetables from spoiling, after my refrigerator and freezer stopped working. This one makes pickled green beans.
Serves: 6
Preparation: 10 minutes
Fermentation: 4 weeks or more
If you haven’t read the first post of this mini-series, saving frozen spinach and cauliflower with saag gōbhī, here’s a refresher. We have a 21-year old side-by-side fridge freezer at home, which we bought along with other appliances and furniture while acquiring the apartment. I sometimes wrote that I considered the amount of frozen food I had stored as an operational risk. I was half-joking. To mitigate this risk, we had gradually emptied the freezer and the fridge, to eventually turned it off before leaving for a hand of days. When we came back, I deep-cleaned the fridge and the freezer compartments. I returned from the grocery store with 11 kg of frozen veggies to help the freezer return to its set temperature, only to find that the appliance was short-circuiting, and could not be used. The timer to cook all frozen vegetables before they would spoil started.
I like green beans, either hot in Thai-style dishes or cold in salad — especially with potatoes. I had bought a 1 kg bag of green beans and given what happened to the freezer, I thought about turning them into fermented pickles. This recipe of green beans is similar to traditional dilly beans, American pickled green beans with dill. I didn’t have dill, however I had black pepper corns, garlic cloves, chili peppers. And, of course, plenty of green beans!
Disclaimer: in this mini-series, time and quantities are often approximated, because I was time-constrained. The countdown to wasting the food was ticking, and I was investigating how to repair the fridge freezer in parallel. I took no notes and I shot only few pictures. The articles of the series skip the usual “About …” and “Here’s a tip before you go” sections. On the other hand, they feature a new “Preservation” paragraph, specific to the constraints of having neither a fridge nor a freezer.
Ingredients
1 kg frozen green beans
Black pepper corns
Garlic cloves
Dried chili peppers
160 g of coarse salt
2 L water
Preparation
Since this recipe doesn’t require to cook its ingredients, there are no Cooking steps. The amounts of water and salt you need are correlated, and the total depends on the size of the pot you use for the fermentation — don’t hesitate to increase or lower the suggested quantities, as long as you respect the salt to water ratio of 8% minimum: 8 g of salt for 100 mL.
Peel the garlic cloves, cut in half, then remove their stems
Heat the water and dissolve the coarse salt
Arrange the green beans vertically in your fermentation pot if it is narrow, otherwise just drop them as they come; alternate with garlic cloves, black pepper corns and chili peppers
Add the salted water until you cover all the ingredients
If you have weights, place them before closing the lid of your pot
Find the right place to store your pot. Avoid sunlight and heat during the fermentation process.
Fermentation
Fermentation is as old as it is convenient — provided it is done properly. With neither a fridge nor a freezer, our ancestors had to find ways to preserve food. Fermentation allows you to preserve food for months to years. Pickling alters the taste of the food, in ways some may not find suitable to their palate — this is important to know.
When removing the lid, you can notice white skins on the surface. These are bacterias which died during the fermentation procedure. It’s normal and you can safely skim them out.
As I wanted to serve these pickled green beans to guests coming to our place, I let the fermentation last a bit longer, for a total of 5 weeks. As you can see from the pictures, they lost their vivid green color during the process. They are, however, still crispy. The fermentation process and the supporting ingredients give the green beans a strong, tangy flavor which is unparalleled by other preparation means.
I cross fingers you never have to fast-cook such amount of vegetables. Even if you never get into the same situation, you may find yourself with an unplanned meal to prepare, with little options — in such case frozen vegetables can surely help.
If you’ve tried the recipe, and would like to comment (whether you loved it, or hated it), please do so! I’m welcoming ideas, even if it will take a while before I can resume with my cooking pace. I need to find a new freezer, first! Stay tuned for the next “episode” in this mini-series about saving frozen veggies with express recipes.