This super quick 15 minute spiced mixed pickle is a delicious and colourful accompaniment to salads and sandwiches. Also great for snacking on straight from the jar!

Perfect Pickles

I am most certainly a pickle person!

Pickles come in all shapes and sizes and I think they are the absolute perfect accompaniment to so many different foods. Whether it’s jazzing up a plain old sandwich, dressing up some drab salad leaves or cheering up a cheese patter, pickles provide a perfect pairing to so many meals.

Pickling is by no means a modern phenomenon. People all over the world have been pickling for thousands of years as a way of keeping foods fresh before modern preservation methods were invented. In fact, pickling is thought to have started over 4,000 years ago when people in ancient Mesopotamia began soaking cucumbers in acidic brine. This gave them an excellently simple way to keep their food stocks up and safeguard against times of shortage.

From these ancient beginnings right through to the modern day, pickling is hugely popular the world over and it’s not difficult to understand why!

You can pickle almost any vegetable that you can think of and it will give you delicious results. From the classic cucumber or gherkin, to crunchy and tangy onions, green beans, cauliflower, tomatoes and the list goes on and on!

It’s actually really good fun experimenting with pickle-making and finding the perfect combination to tickle your own personal tastebuds.

Veritable Veg

For this super quick 15 minute mixed spice pickle recipe, I’ve chosen three well loved vegetables; cucumber, red onion and carrot. All of these are widely available in stores and don’t usually cost the earth. (Saving money whenever possible is always welcome these days.)

I love how these three different vegetables also create such a colourful final pickle! Purple, green and orange altogether is so gorgeously vibrant as the vegetables sit together happily in their glass jar.

I also find quick pickling is a fantastic way to get kids to eat more veg! Many kids don’t seem to like raw vegetables but marinate them for a while in spicy vinegar and all of a sudden it’s their favourite food! Getting our families to eat more fresh, healthy and home-made food surely can’t be a bad thing. This quick 15 minute mixed spice pickle recipe ticks all the right boxes for kid-friendly eating for sure.

Any kid-friendly recipe that’s packed full of healthy nutrients is a huge win in my book. Check out some of my other firm family favourites that pack a healthy punch; Such as my 5 Minute Hidden Veg Sauce, my 10 Minute Tofu Satay and my Best 5 Minute Spinach Pesto to name just a few.

Now, a little word on pickle preparation here. The key to ensuring your quick 15 minute mixed spice pickles turn out perfectly is making sure you slice the vegetables very thinly. In order to achieve that, each veg needs to be sliced no thicker then around 2-3mm. If the veg slices are much thicker than that, they just won’t take the flavour of the yummy pickling liquid as well. So to get the maximum taste, minimise your veg slice sizes.

Apart from the fact that this super quick 15 minute spiced mixed pickle is such a great time saver, pickling at speed has other great advantages. For a start, the vegetables retain much of the crunch and freshness that can be lost in lengthier pickle recipes. Picking does tend to unfortunately decrease the nutritional content over time which is a bit of a shame. This does mean that fresher is better! Eating your pickles after only 15 short minutes in the brine means less time for nutrient loss which is a big bonus.

That isn’t to say that you can’t keep your pickles in the fridge for longer. As we’ve already seen, pickling is the perfect way to keep things fresh and tasty for a long time. These 15 minute spiced mixed pickles remain delicious for weeks after they’ve been made. Simply pop them in the fridge then bring them out whenever the fancy takes you.

Ingredients

Now, lets talk a bit about the finer points of pickling all those lovely colourful veggies.

Any basic pickle recipe usually involves adding equal parts vinegar and water to create the basic liquid, then the addition of salt. Often it’s either white wine or cider vinegar that’s used, rather than sweeter, thicker types like balsamic. Sugar is often added also. Beyond this basic formula, the sky’s the limit in terms of what else you can add!

For this quick 15 minute spiced mixed pickle, I’ve decided to go a bit Eastern with my flavours. Cumin, fennel, coriander and black pepper add a slightly curried and spicy flavour to the final vegetables which is really warming and delicious.

When you serve up the final pickle a lot of these lovely spices will cling to the vegetables. Don’t worry about this and don’t try and brush them all the way as they add to the delicious flavour and can be eaten alongside the vegetables. Spending some time in the vinegary brine means a lot of the previously intense flavour of the spices mellows out so they shouldn’t be overpowering and instead, just add a lovely zingy flavour that complements the pickles perfectly.

Quantity Questions

How much pickle to make?? That is the question!

For this 15 minute spiced mixed pickle recipe, I’ve been fairly modest with quantities. This recipe basically fills up one standard 500ml (pint) glass jar. I find this is enough to share out between several people for one meal. You can feel free to make more pickles if you’d like to by increasing the quantities of each ingredient but remember to factor in more preparation time if you do this.

Sometimes I like to make two jars – one for now and one for the fridge – meaning my household is never short on pickle perfection!