Pickled Carrots

The other day, I had a lovely salad consisting of edamame beans, pickled cucumber and carrots and since I've managed to land myself with a whole kilogram of baby carrots with no good idea of what to do with them, I decided it's time to try out a new pickling recipe.

I believe the salad I had was a East Asian type of pickling and so I selected this recipe. It seemed very straight forward.

I originally planned to add some spicing to it, but decided against it, this being the first time I try this out. I had different amounts of course and had to convert to metric. As I was getting prepared, it occurred to me that if I were to cut all carrots the same way, I'd have a kilo of pickled carrots in 3 days' time, so it wouldn't really solve things with all the carrots. So I decided to pick out the smallest ones and keep them whole. Then from the remainder, I quartered some and cut into Julienne strips the rest of them. My thinking was that the Julienne strips would be ready first and we'd manage to eat them by the time the quartered pieces get ready and at the end, the whole baby carrots would be ready.

Ingredients

1 kg peeled baby carrots
4.5 tbsp white wine vinegar
3 tbsp salt
3 tbsp granulated sugar
10.5 dl warm water

Method

1. Cut the carrots into desired sizes, pat dry with kitchen paper if damp, then distribute into jars.
   
2. Mix together vinegar, salt, sugar and warm water and stir for about a minute until the dry ingredients have dissolved completely.
   
3. Pour over the carrots, filling the jars to cover everything completely. Close the jars tightly and allow the water to cool down, before placing in the fridge.
4. If the carrots were cut very thinly, they should be ready in 3 - 5 days, the larger pieces would take longer.
5. If the carrots were finely grated, then they could be ready to eat after about an hour.

As this is an experiment, we tried the carrots after one day and after two days as well. On the whole, OK, but not very impressive. The carrots are still crunchy, but not as stiff as when raw. The liquid has made them quite salty, but that's it. I would have liked more flavour. There wasn't too big a difference over the days and since I have three jars of these things, I'll need to come up with a way to add some interest to them.

Update on 18th August: Actually, things have improved - after a week, the carrots which were sliced thinnest were properly ready to eat. Lundulph ate most of the ones I'd served as a side to our salad. They were crunchy and salty and pickled. So I stand corrected and we have two more jars of these lovely things to munch on.