Give Homemade Pickles A Hint Of Sweetness With This Ancient Ingredient

When ancient Mesopotamians first started to pickle foods in vinegar over four thousand years ago, it was primarily for the sake of preservation. The point wasn't that vegetables suspended in vinegar or brine tasted good (although they often did); it was to make them last a long time. Now that we have refrigerators, we don't pickle our veggies for the same reason — but that doesn't mean we can't make use of another famously long-lasting ingredient to make our pickles taste better. That's why, if you're looking for a sweetener for your pickled cucumbers, radishes, or shrimp (yes, you can pickle shrimp), you might want to reach for the honey.

Honey, as you may know, lasts pretty much forever. It has antimicrobial and antiseptic properties, which ensure that the stuff you'll find in a pharaoh's tomb is more or less the same as the stuff that comes in a little plastic bear-shaped bottle at the supermarket. This dovetails nicely with the pickling process, but even more important is the sweetness it lends: even sweeter than sugar, you'll have to use slightly less of it in your brine, but it'll be a welcome addition all the same.

Like we said, if you were to use honey as a one-to-one replacement for sugar, you would find yourself overwhelmed by sweetness. If you're going to make use of it, you'll want to use 3/4 of a cup of honey instead of a cup of sugar — or, if you don't have much of a sweet tooth, you can use just half a cup. The good news, however, is that honey will often lend a more complex flavor than something like sugar, which only offers pure sweetness. With honey, depending on what kind you use, you could add plenty of more subtle, distinct floral flavors to your brine. (Something like tupelo honey will probably be much too expensive to use for a brine, delicious though it may be.)

Another thing to keep in mind is how honey will play with your brine. Honey, after all, contains some wild yeast — which, in tandem with other bacteria in your brine, may lead to fermentation. Sometimes you want that sort of thing with pickles, but other times you'll prefer something more straightforward. In any case, doing some research into best practices for pickling with honey will serve you well.