On Thursday afternoon, students found themselves pickling vegetables in the Garden to Plate event at the Campus Community Garden organized by Associated Students for a hands-on cooking demo.
The event included a cooking demo led by Linh Vong, a culinary programs specialist and chef educator at Pie Ranch, a nonprofit educational farm.
Students learned how to make pickled fava beans, Asian pickled cucumbers, Đồ Chua Vietnamese pickled carrots and daikon radish.
Kymaraa King, a first-year child development student, said getting the chance to learn how to make pickles made her want to come to garden events more.
“My grandma likes to make pickles a lot and give them to me, so that’s why I was like, ‘OK, wait, I do want to make them too,’ ” King said.
Vong prepared charred scallion Singapore noodles, pickled shallots and radishes for students to eat while waiting for the cooking lesson to begin.
To start the event, Vong went over safety protocols and explained what the cooking lesson was going to look like.
On an electric stove, with help from a student, Vong prepared brine for each recipe in a saucepan, making enough for the pickled veggies.
The brine consisted of salt, sugar, rice vinegar, water, garlic and chili peppers.
Students split up into three groups to prepare vegetables for pickling at different stations, groups either shredded carrots, onions or peeled fava beans.
Once vegetables were fully prepared, they were divided evenly into Mason jars and pushed down to get rid of air left in the jars.
Each jar once filled with the premade brine sat without a lid for about two minutes before being closed with lids.
Vong said to participants to let the vegetables sit in the jars for one to two days for the best taste.
Compared to the normal pickling process, the quick pickle recipe is different. Quick pickles don’t require the full canning process, according to a July 2, 2018 Pioneer Women webpage.
Eesha Patel, a second-year business administration student, said she likes learning new things at the graden.
“It’s really cool to just learn how to cook something, especially with stuff you can kind of grow on your own,” Patel said. “I kind of know how pickling looks, but I didn’t know exactly what was in the brine, for example, that it needs to be lukewarm, not boiling.”
Each student got to take home a jar of pickled vegetables they made during the cooking class.
Vong said they hope students had fun while cooking from this lesson.
“Learning how to preserve food, having fun with it, and learning that it’s like well not so hard once you’ve tried it, and it’s also not so hard if you’re doing it with a lot more people and with the community too,” Vong said.
The Campus Community Garden will host a movie night showing “The Lorax” on April 23 for Earth day and its last event of the semester.
