Pickled Carrots

I don't grow carrots in the garden.  I have done radishes, but never carrots.  I don't have tilled soil that goes down far enough to accomodate carrots. I got some Paris Market seeds one year (a shorter variety) but never planted them.

Nonetheless, if I ever do grow them, I may end up with enough to need to preserve them somehow.  Then again, maybe I won't.  Excuses falling by the wayside, I decided to try pickling carrots last month--just because.  The concept is interesting, and I like pickled vegetables.  I've done cucumbers (dill and sweet), dilled green beans, and asparagus.  All have turned out well. I've also done peaches.  I've bought commercially canned okra.  But I had never tried carrots.

As I mentioned before when discussing peach butter, I usually don't get very creative with canning.  Canning guides admonish against that as a rule, but the keys with any canning recipe are that if it's destined for a boiling water bath, the pH has to be below 4.7, and with either boiling water or pressure, the temperature has to get to the required threshold for the required time to kill pathogens.


The National Center for Home Food Preservation has a recipe for pickled carrots and Pick Your Own has essentially the same recipe.

I used peeled baby carrots (note that the NCHFP has a separate recipe for pickled baby carrots, but it's basically the same except that it substitues a volume measurement for the carrots instead of weight).  Because no pre-processing is involved, unlike most things I can, this was a quick job.  I just dumped the carrots into a couple of large Cinderella-style mixing bowls and looked over them to see if there were any that needed to be culled or trimmed (ever eat a bad carrot? They are not good). I used six pounds of carrots (two bags of three pounds each).  This is about ten percent more than two times the amount in the recipes referred to above, but I think the syrup mix was adequate the first time (i.e., 11 cups of vinegar with 2 cups of water).  By the time I did the second batch, I forgot that 11/2 worked so I upsized it in the same proportion, using 13 cups of vinegar and proportionally more water, plus an extra 1/3 cup of sugar and a bit of extra salt.  The second time, I probably had almost two cups left over. 

When I can, I run the jars through a dishwasher cycle, which cleans and heats them.  So I didn't even start processing until the dishwasher was running.  Getting the syrup mix up to boiling was relatively quick, and once I dumped the carrots in, it took a relatively long time to get it back to boiling for the three-minute simmer referred to in the instructions (six pound of refrigerated carrots really cooled things down).

The dishwasher was in its dry cycle by the time I got the carrots back to boiling, so I started filling jars as soon as I could.  The first time I did eight pints and one quart; the second time I did three quarts and three pints.  If you're counting, you see I got more the first time, at least in terms of jars.   In the first batch, the last pint was only about half full of carrots; the rest was syrup.

To fill each jar, I pretty much just followed the directions--into each empty jar went two tablespoons of mustard seed and one tablespoon of celery seed per pint, then carrots were ladled in using a canning funnel; I shook and tapped the bottom of the jar on the counter top to settle the carrots as compactly as possible.  Then I put in enough syrup to get the headspace to about 1/2".

Overall, they turned out pretty well.  People who have tried them have either grimaced and walked away after just one or two or eaten them with gusto.  They are somewhat sweet, as you might expect given both the flavor of carrots and the added sugar.

The other methods for preserving carrots include dehydrating and freezing, but both of those require blanching.

So now I have a bunch of carrots, but I've already eaten a fair number.  I don't think I'll have any trouble going through these in the next year or so.