Pickling Onions and Beetroot for the Pantry

Why Pickling Deserves a Place in Your Kitchen

A shelf of home-pickled jars is one of the quiet pleasures of a well-run kitchen. Shop-bought pickled onions are often soft and pallid, tasting mostly of harsh vinegar; homemade ones are crisp, spiced and properly sharp. Pickled beetroot is a world away from the sweet, limp slices in supermarket jars — deep crimson, earthy, and as good with goat's cheese as it is alongside cold roast beef.

Both are cheap to make and need nothing beyond jars, a large pan and an afternoon of patience. Here is how to do it properly.

Getting the Vinegar and Spices Right

The vinegar does the preserving, so choose it carefully. Everything else is flavouring.

• Vinegar: Proper pickling vinegar, usually malt at 6–7% acetic acid, gives the firmest texture and keeps best. Distilled malt keeps beetroot bright rather than browning it. Cider vinegar is delicious but darkens over time. Ordinary table vinegar at 5% works, though the results are softer and will not keep as long.
• Spices: A tablespoon of pickling spice per 500ml of vinegar is a good starting point — black peppercorns, allspice berries, mustard and coriander seeds, a few cloves, a blade of mace, bay leaves and a dried chilli if you like warmth. Toasting them for a minute in a dry pan wakes them up.
• Sugar: One to two tablespoons per 500ml for onions; up to 100g per 500ml for beetroot, where sweetness balances the earthiness.
• Salt: Needed only for the onion brine, never in the pickling vinegar itself.

Pickled Onions: Slow, Sharp and Worth the Wait

Small pickling onions or banana shallots are ideal — roughly the size of a large marble. To peel them without tears, top and tail each one, tip into a bowl, pour over boiling water to cover and leave for two minutes. The skins will slip away easily.

Then the brine, the step most people skip. Dissolve 50g of salt in 1 litre of cold water and pour it over the peeled onions. Weight them down with a plate so they stay submerged and leave for 24 hours — 48 for a really firm crunch. Drain, rinse well, then prick each onion once or twice with a skewer; this stops them shrivelling as they mature.

Warm 600ml of pickling vinegar with a tablespoon of spice mix and two tablespoons of sugar, simmer for five minutes, then cool slightly. Pack the onions tightly into sterilised jars, pour over the warm vinegar so everything is covered by at least a centimetre, and seal with a vinegar-proof lid. Leave somewhere cool and dark for six to eight weeks; three months is better still.

Pickled Beetroot: Sweet, Earthy and Deeply Coloured

Beetroot must be cooked first. Scrub the roots gently, leaving the tail and a couple of centimetres of stalk intact — cutting them off lets the colour bleed away. Wrap in foil and roast at 180°C for an hour to ninety minutes, or boil in plenty of water for 45 to 90 minutes depending on size. They are ready when a skewer slides in without resistance. Once cool enough to handle, rub the skins off with kitchen paper, wearing gloves unless you want pink hands for a day. Slice into 5mm rounds or cut into 2cm dice.

Warm 500ml of cider or distilled malt vinegar with 100g of soft brown sugar, a teaspoon of salt and your spices: a cinnamon stick, four cloves, six allspice berries, a teaspoon of black peppercorns and a couple of bay leaves. Simmer for five minutes, then strain for a clear pickle or leave the spices in for a more rustic jar. Pack the beetroot into sterilised jars, pour over the hot vinegar and seal. Edible after a week; two weeks gives a rounder flavour.

Maturing, Storing and Serving

Keep jars in a cool, dark cupboard and use vinegar-proof lids — the plastic-lined metal sort, or glass with a rubber seal. Plain metal lids corrode within weeks and taint the contents.

A cloudy brine or a thin white film on the surface is usually harmless yeast; skim it off and keep everything below the vinegar line. Soft onions almost always mean the brine was skipped or the vinegar too weak. If the level drops as you eat your way through a jar, top up with fresh vinegar rather than leaving anything exposed.

As for eating, these are more versatile than most people expect:

• On a cheese board with sharp Cheddar, crumbly Wensleydale or a blue, where the acidity cuts the richness.
• With cold meats, pork pies and a baked ham.
• Tossed through warm potato salad or scattered over chicory and walnuts.
• Beetroot with goat's cheese, in a sandwich with cream cheese and rocket, or blitzed into a dressing with olive oil and a spoonful of its own vinegar.

Label each jar with the contents and the date. A jar made in October and given in December is one of the nicest things you can hand someone.