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To Pickle Cauliflower

A simple pickled cauliflower stems recipe using salt, peppercorns, and boiling vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 888 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Pickle Cauliflower

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the cauliflower stems and wash them carefully.

  2. Sprinkle the stems with ½ cup of coarse sea salt and let them stand for 12 hours.

Pickle

  1. Shake off the salt and place the stems in jars with a few peppercorns.

  2. Cover the stems with boiling vinegar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cauliflower + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together888 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cauliflower stems
Provides the main crisp, firm vegetable texture of the pickle.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the stems, firming them and seasoning them before pickling.
Boiling vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the stems.

The step that matters

Salting the stems. Salt draws water out of the cauliflower through osmosis, which firms the texture and seasons the stems. Leaving them too briefly gives a softer, less seasoned result, while shaking off the salt well before jarring keeps the pickle from tasting overly salty.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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