Quick pickled jalapeño peppers, crunchy and sweet and hot. Let’s face it: the best pickled jalapeños are homemade because you can slice them just as you like; de-seed or not, and maybe throw a habanero in the jar to trick everyone.
Pickles are usually among the things you should buy rather than cook, unless you have an allotment/orchard/farm and really a bumper crop of one vegetable or another. It’s tedious, the outcome is far too much to go through in a season so even a small jar ends up cover with furry mould hiding the onions/gherkins/cauliflower inside.
Pickles are among the things that you’d seen your Gran do, taking hours and hours, and wondered why she couldn’t just buy the things in the shop – especially that shop bought were usually much nicer than her efforts. Pickles in old-fashioned jars with rubber bands that I could never manage to open; the damn band would go into hiding under the lid and there was nothing to grab, or you pulled too hard and the jar exploded in a firework of gherkins or plums in vinegar (especially foul).
Anyway, who needs or eats pickles? ‘Pickled’ is an off-putting word to start with, suggesting that something that should rightly be dead is being artificially preserved, against the law of nature and common sense. There are much better preserving methods: dry your vegetables and you’ll be able to re-hydrate them to be almost as good as fresh; drying intensifies the flavour too. But pickling? It just makes everything taste sour.
And it would all be well and I could confine pickles to a culinary cemetery if not for one dish: tacos. How can you possibly have a taco without pickled jalapeños? It would be like having an egg without salt, scones without cream or burger without gherkin (hmm, another use for pickles?) I for one couldn’t. And I am a devoted tacoista.
I can repeat after young me: go and buy a jar, it will be perfectly nice. But why not make a tiny little jar, just for a couple taco sessions, removing the seeds if you mind them (like me) or slicing the peppers really thin if that’s what you like? And the major plus of this recipe here is that it’s quick, there are no rubber seals and the juicy jalapeños are ready in an hour.
Go ahead and give it a try at your next taco session and you won’t go back. And I might revisit the issue of gherkins (no burger without a slice) and extend my pickle repertoire.