Kitchen Lab: Green Chilli Pickle Recipe

I LOVE FOOD! Especially Asian food and with it, I always have to eat some sort of chilli, whether it's sriracha sauce, gochujang sauce, wasabi, Thai sweet chilli, belachan sambal, or green chilli pickle. Recently, I made my very own batch of home-made green chilli pickle and here's how I made it.

ROVENA'S GREEN CHILLI PICKLE RECIPE

Materials:

3 cups Water, boiled
1/4 lb Green Chilli
1 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Sugar
1 cup Apple Vinegar
1 tbsp Soy Sauce

1 Jar or Container with Lid

Method:

Set water to boil. While waiting, chop green chilli into thin slices and place in a bowl. If you wish, you can discard the seeds or leave some in.
Then carefully pour boiling water over the chilli slices and soak them for 20 seconds or until the chilli changes from a bright to a dull green colour. Drain the water.
In the jar, mix vinegar, sugar, salt and soy sauce to make the brine. Then add the cut green chilli in until fully submerged in the brine. Top up with extra vinegar if needed. Cover the jar with its lid.
Leave jar in the refrigerator. Pickle will be ready to eat after at least 24 hours of curing and it should be good to keep for up to 2 months in the fridge.

So easy to make and so tasty to eat with noodles! Also a great topping for pizza.

Ingredient Substitutions:

If you don't have:	You can use:
Green chilli	Jalapeno
Apple vinegar	Rice vinegar White vinegar
Soy sauce	Nothing (exclude, it's optional)

THE CHEMISTRY OF CHILLI & PICKLES

So much chemistry goes on in the kitchen. Have you ever wondered what makes chilli spicy? The culprit is a long molecule called capsaicin you can see in the You're Hot Card.

Capsaicin molecule | What Makes Chilli Pepper Hot

What about the molecules in some of the other pickling ingredients?

Acetic acid is the main component of vinegar and you can see its molecular structure in the Sorry You're In A Pickle Card. Since it's an acid, it acts as an antimicrobial preservative and that is why pickles can last for quite a long time without spoiling.

The brine of the pickle also contains salt, sugar, and soy sauce. Table salt is made up of ions sodium (Na+) and chloride (Cl-) that can easily dissolve in vinegar. Speaking of salt, I love this inspirational Quote by Isak Dinesen -- "the cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea."

Table sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide sugar made up of two simple sugars: glucose + fructose. You can see the sugar molecule in the Hey Sugar Button.

The flavour of soy sauce is imparted by a molecule with a very long name 4-hydroxy-2(or 5)-ethyl-5(or 2)-methyl-3(2H)-furanone (can you say that in one breath?) and you can see what it looks like in the Soy Sauce Card.

Do you like chillis and spicy condiments? What's your favourite hot sauce? If you have a chance to try out my green chilli pickle recipe, I would love to hear how it turns out.