Ingredients:
1 head cauliflower, broken into florets
2 jalapenos, halved
8 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon celery seed
3 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 1/2 teaspoons caraway seeds
3 teaspoons yellow mustard seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1/2 teaspoon charnushka
3 cups water
2 cups white vinegar
1/3 cup pickling salt

Directions:
Bring the water, vinegar and salt to a boil. Prep the lids/jars. Evenly divide all of the spices, peppers and garlic between 4 wide mouth pint jars. Add the cauliflower, packing it down and leaving 1/4 inch headroom.

Pour in the vinegar mixture, still leaving that 1/4 inch headroom. Close the jars and process for 10 minutes in a hot water bath. Allow to sit 1 week before eating.

Yield: 4 pints

Note: If you’d rather not process these pickles, you can make these into “refrigerator” pickles. Just let them come to room temperature and keep all of the jars in the refrigerator.

Note: A great source for canning information is the Blue Book guide to preserving. I highly recommend it for learning how to can. Here is a bunch of other canning books and equipment I find useful.

My thoughts:

I always find cauliflower to be oddly expensive so when some went to sale recently, I thought I’d finally do something I’ve been thinking about for a while: make cauliflower pickles! I am of course, a huge fan of anything pickled and while I’ve mostly had pickled cauliflower as part of a larger pickled dish like giardiniera, I thought they’d be fun to pickle on their own. I can just picture a pickle plate with these pretty white pickles, some dill pickled garlic, Old Bay zucchini pickles, hot pepper pickled asparagus and smokin’ hot pickled okra. I also really enjoyed these with a wedge of really sharp cheddar as a late night snack.

One unexpected thing about these pickles is that after I took them out of the pot, there was a lot of “float”; the cauliflower was above about 2 inches of brine. The next morning however, they were as they are pictured there, evenly distributed in the brine just like they were before processing. I haven’t had this happen before but I like it! The pickles would taste the same either way but the jars look prettier with the cauliflower spread out.