David Chang’s Pickled Carrots

The past couple of winters have brought a slew of lovely cookbooks into the Plants on Deck house. (For a little pictorial tour, check this out: Yummy) One of the more recent additions to the sagging cookbook shelf  is the delightful Momofuku,  by David Chang and Peter Meehan.

Chang’s super-simple pickling recipe arrived just days before Philly’s first hard frost and rescued POD’s carrots from certain death. Sadly, the parsnips and sprouts may not survive. Obviously, the brine is easy to scale back and a 1/4 recipe took care of the carrots.

Momofuku Pickled Carrots
1 c. water super-hot tap water
½ c. rice wine vinegar
6 tbs sugar
2 ¼ tsp kosher salt
vegetables (carrots, cauliflower, beets, radishes, cucumbers, etc…)

1.) Combine the water, vinegar, sugar, and salt in a mixing bowl and stir until the sugar dissolves

2.) Pack the prepared vegetables into a quart container. Pour the brine over the vegetables cover, and refrigerate. You can eat the pickles immediately, but they will taste better after they’ve had time to sit 3-4 days at a minimum, a week for optimum flavor. Most of these pickles will keep for at least a month.

3) Two pounds baby carrots (as in infant or dwarf, not the whittled and bagged supermarket variety), scrubbed, peeled, and trimmed. If you can buy carrots with tops, leave ½ inch of the tops attached and clean them well; it makes for a better presentation. For larger but still small carrots, cut them lengthwise into halves or thirds – they should be a size that’s comfortable to pick up and snack on, through they don’t need to be bite-sized.