Kate: In our epic day of Yooper pasty-making, we also made chow chow. If you’re already going to be chopping an epic amount of veggies, adding a few to make some chow chow just seems like a no-brainer.
Beautiful jars of homemade chow chow
Sarah: What’s chow-chow? Good question. It is a North American pickled relish of the vein of Piccalilli, a British version of Indian Pickles, or Italian giardiniera. It can contain any number of vegetables, from pearl onions, cauliflower, sweet peppers, cucumbers, and in the Southern United States; it contains lots of cabbage. The spices in it, especially turmeric, lead me and food historians like Luis W. Fernandez to believe it has Chinese and Indian origins. Some versions are sweeter, others are spicier, or have a mustard tang. Wherever it originated from, it is delicious and is enjoyed from Canada’s Provinces on down to the Southern U.S. on a wide variety of foods from baked beans, hot dogs, hamburgers, biscuits and gravy, mashed potatoes, greens, sandwiches and even fish dishes. Today we are suggesting you give it a try on a Upper Peninsula of Michigan pasty.
Kate: It’s pretty much THE condiment for pasties…at least in my family. I’m a ketchup person myself, but everyone else in my family (including my husband, who discovered pasties through me) goes for chow chow, especially if it’s homemade. Once again, we used a well-loved recipe of Gail’s, and we’ve typed it out for you so you don’t have to try to read the one in the pictures here.
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- Truly a well-loved recipe
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- It is falling apart it has been used so much!
Chopping up a head of cauliflower for the chow chow mix
All chopped and ready for brining
Most of the work for chow chow is in the chopping of all of the various veggies. The rest is mostly passive: brining, boiling, canning. Some recipes will have you brine the veggies for a day, some for only an hour. Ours calls for two hours of brining.
The veggies brined for two hours, also visible is our delightful box wine selection
While the veggies brined, and while the rest of us were chopping veggies for pasties, Lenore made the sauce for the chow chow. It’s a pretty straightforward all-in-one-pot sauce.
Add all of the sauce ingredients into a large pot, and boil
It seems like a strangely large pot for a small amount of sauce, but when you add the veggies to it, it is very clear why you need such a big pot. Once the veggies are added, you boil everything a second time before ladling into prepared glass jars for canning.
The pot is suddenly quite full, and the bright yellow color comes from the turmeric
Be careful and of course leave head room…something Lenore initially forgot, as you can see here
All processed and now cooling
Chow Chow Recipe
Ingredients:
1-2 heads Cauliflower
6 cucumbers, peeled and de-seeded
2 bunches celery (one if you include cauliflower)
1 pint pickling onions
2 red peppers
cover chopped vegetables with water, add 1/2 c. salt and soak for 2 hours, then drain.
Sauce
1 pint vinegar plus 1 cup
1/2 c. sugar
1 T dry mustard
1 T turmeric
2 T celery seeds
2 T mustard seed
1/2 c. flour
In a large pot, combine 1 pint vinegar, and the next 5 ingredients and bring to a boil. Add drained veggies and bring to a boil again. Mix the flour and remaining vinegar together, and add to the boiling sauce and veggie mixture to thicken. When the sauce has thickened, take off of heat and ladle into prepared jars for processing.
If it is too thick, add 1/3 c. sugar to 1 c. vinegar