Bok choy, why do you mock me so?

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

A couple of years ago I grew bok choy in the garden.  It was one of the easiest vegetables I’ve ever grown, but I just didn’t fall in love with it enough to have it in the garden again.  I’ve just never found very many recipes for bok choy that I love or can eat over and over again.  Last year I made a killer wonton soup using a bunch of bok choy from the CSA share, but it’s not soup weather.  And I make a great kimchi, but I still have some leftover from last year.

There was a giant head of bok choy in the Landisdale Farm CSA share last week that, predictably, sat around the kitchen and never got used.  My rule is that if I don’t use it within a week, I have to find a way to preserve it.  After giving it much thought and doing a ton of research, I decided to do two things with the bok choy: dry it and pickle it.

I got the idea for drying bok choy from the many websites that kept saying bok choy stalks have a very celery-like texture - which means freezing is out of the question.  Well, maybe not out of the question, but the texture suffers.  Anyway, I ran into a site that suggested drying celery in a dehydrator.  I stripped off the leaves and sliced up the stalk - it took about six hours on the lowest heat setting.

Pickling bok choy leaves is not quite the same as making kimchi.  It’s more akin to making sauerkraut: you cut the leaves into chiffonade and pack it into canning jars, laying pickling salt in every 1/2 inch or so.  The salt will draw the water out of the bok choy, making its own brine.  If you are super careful about canning, you can run the pickled choy in a water bath after a week or two, but you can just as easily skip all that if your jars are very clean to begin with.