Pickled Purple Daikon
The day before I left for Australia, I found a beautiful purple daikon radish at the farmer’s market.
I didn’t have time to eat it before I left. So I did the obvious thing: made it into pickles.
For the first few hours, the radish’s incredible purple tie-die color lasted. But eventually it gave way to the pickling liquid, and the vinegar turned everything a brilliant beetish purple. Less startling - but still incredibly lovely.
Pickled Daikon
1 large purple daikon radish, sliced
3/4 cup water
1 1/4 cup unseasoned rice vinegar
splash soy sauce
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
thumb-sized piece of ginger, smashed with back of a spoon
dried chile
Black peppercorns
Coriander seeds
Warm the liquids with the sugar and salt in a small nonreactive pot, just until the sugar dissolves.
Put the thinly-sliced daikon and ginger into a pretty bowl along with the chile, peppercorns and coriander seeds. Allow to cool to room temperature and then refrigerate.
I imagine that this will be good for about two weeks - but we'll see when I get back from New Zealand.