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Pickled Cauliflowers

Cauliflower is pickled in salt, boiled water, and white vinegar over several days.

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 ↓

Pickled Cauliflowers

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the cauliflower

  1. Pull apart the cauliflower into bunches and spread them on an earthen dish.

  2. Sprinkle coarse sea salt over the cauliflower and let it stand for three days.

Scald and pickle

  1. After three days, place the cauliflower into earthen jars and pour boiling water over them.

  2. Let them stand overnight, then drain the liquid.

  3. Transfer the cauliflower to glass jars and fill them up with white 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
Forms the pickle's crisp-firm texture as it is salted and then softened in liquid.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the cauliflower, firming it and concentrating its flavor before pickling.
White vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that gives the pickle its sour taste and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Salting for three days. Salt pulls moisture out of the cauliflower through osmosis, which firms the florets and seasons them evenly. Salting for too short a time leaves them watery and less crisp, so the full rest matters.

“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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