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.