Crafty-Ass Witch

(I know it’s a bad photo, but you can’t even see the beets because the brine is so dark. You can kind of see them here…)

A variation on Alton Brown’s pickled beets, adjusted for water bath canning. I initially made these as refrigerator pickles and found them to be utterly delightful. I subbed cider vinegar for tarragon since I didn’t have any and found that the tanginess really brings out the beet flavor.

It took a little bit of figuring out how to adjust this for water bath canning. The most important thing was to increase the vinegar – you really need a 2:1 vinegar/water ratio to ensure proper pH (as both twitter and the Ball Book of Preserving have said). Once I did that, I increased the salt and sugar by a third as well.

Eat these straight from the jar or on a slice of good bread with some goat cheese. Careful of the juice, though, it can stain.

Pickled Beets:
2 bunches beets, greens removed
2 cups cider vinegar
1 cup filtered water
3/4 cup sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt

Wash beets, remove stems and roast. I like to wrap mine in in foil and then put in a crockpot for 4 hours on high, but you can also roast them in the oven for an hour. Remove from heat, remove skins and chop.

Prepare remaining ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil.

Scald 2 pint jars. Pack beets in jar, leaving 1/2″ of jar space. Pour in brine, leaving 1/2″ of headspace. (What does that mean? That means leave 1/2″ of space between the top of your beets and where the threads start, then pour the brine over that – you basically want to make sure you’re leaving enough space in your jar for the beets) Process in water bath canner for 30 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for another 5 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool overnight undisturbed. Super delicious.

Tags: canning

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 1:38 am and is filed under canning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.