Sandi and I talked a good bit about how to improve my Lebanese pickled hot peppers. I have been having 1-2 of them, plus one of the grape-leaf toppings, with our squash+mujuddara meals for the past few nights. The hotness is OK, but the flavor could be better, but the real problem is the texture: the first few peppers were too crunchy, which itself isn’t at all a bad thing, except it wasn’t what I was trying to recreate.
Dad’s hot peppers (well, probably Mom’s hot peppers, but made to Dad’s exacting but poorly-articulated specifications and executed with Mom visiting Aunt Nagla, Aunt Kitty or Aunt Theresa to get the skinny on the recipe, because that was how they all rolled) were hot but not too hot, soft but not squishy with a little but of crunchy, vinegary from their brine; and well-preserved enough to be stored in the kitchen cabinet.
I have been in the hospital from food poisoning too many times to put anything in the fucking kitchen cabinet, no matter how well preserved. For those not in the know, I have been in the hospital at least twice, and probably three times, with food poisoning so severe that I became dehydrated enough to require a saline IV. And I realized that the common factor in every triggering event was getting a bit of food that was slightly off in some way, and eating it thinking, “Naaah, it will be fine.”
Yes, food that tastes weird may just be food that tastes weird, but after the third such incident, I deployed one of my Rules(TM) to put a stop to that. My Rules(TM) are things I use to prevent me from going down a path which might get me into serious trouble down the road. Some of my Rules(TM) include: never gamble for money (with exceptions for <$20 dollars in a slot machine if waiting around while friends are gambling at a casino), a one drink per day limit (with a rare second drink several hours later, such as a nightcap if the drink wasn’t strong, a late evening cocktail after a margarita at an early lunch, or a drink in a circumstance when you know you’re not driving, such as a plane flight or a hotel bar after a long plane flight). And another Rule(TM) is “If anything seems off with some food, don’t fucking eat it, full stop — literally no exceptions.”
So my pickled hot peppers go in the fridge, and that leads to the first potential diagnosis of the crunchiness problem: rather than 1-2 months pickling in the cabinet, maybe they need 3-5 months pickling in the fridge. Another might be letting them dehydrate more; Dad’s pickled hot peppers were pretty soft, and Sandi’s mom Dottie suggested letting the peppers dry out longer. Using Sandi’s dehydrator or mild roasting might achieve the same effect of drying the peppers out so they’d absorb more brine and making them softer.
Also, I think I’d radically up the spice in the brine, adding more turmeric and garlic and coriander seeds, which seem to have been a whole net positive on the appearance and flavor of the hot pepper mix. It’s entirely possible that dehydrating / drying out / roasting, jazzing up the brine, and perhaps going full non-refrigerated canning ritual with boiling rather than salt/vinegar fridge canning with mere jar sterilization, would yield better results.
But all of this, note, is unscientific; or, more properly, is what classic thinkers would have called science and modern thinkers would have called art: examining a situation, rationally analyzing it, and then applying the results of that rational analysis to suggest a next alternative. That procedure sounds great, and it sure suckered the Greeks, but it’s total bullshit. In real life, you do not fucking know whether the ideas you have extracted from past events will apply in future circumstances, and the only fucking solution is to simply try them, record the results, and attempt to generalize over many instances, hoping that what you think you have learned is not an artifact of random noise.
That’s depressing, in general, and doubly depressing for professional scientists. Most of the questions we want to answer in our daily lives are not amenable to the methods of science because the events in question happen too rarely to get statistically reliably conclusions (and before you protest that you are actually “scientifically” testing your ideas, let me point out that you need roughly 30 trials in each major bucket of analysis, good or bad, to have statistically reliable results, and I can virtually guarantee you’re not conducting 30-1000 trials for most of the things you think you have learned in the course of your life).
No, we instead rely on our innate learning: the gut that Jim Kirk relied on, Spock mocked, and McCoy understood the wisdom of. We’ve got three point five billion years of evolution underlying our learning systems, so when humans learn things, the results of our learning aren’t bad.
But a rule of thumb is not validated knowledge.
The only solution is to have humility, accept that we can be wrong, and to try, try, try again.
So I’m going to keep canning Lebanese pickled peppers until I get it right, is what I’m saying.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the pickled peppers, in their intended deployment at a meal.
