Eggplant Preserves

I usually pickle everything, so I thought I'd change it up a bit. This is one of my favorite recipes I found when I started pickling last year, and I've been prepping for it all year. It's an Italian method of pickling where the vegetables are boiled in vinegar and wine then preserved in olive oil. The variety of ingredients used gives the preserves an amazing aroma and a layers of flavors.

I like to capture the essence of summer in this pickle by using a dry Riesling or Gewurztraminer. The floral and fruity notes of peaches, apricots, lychees, roses, jasmine, etc (depending on which wine you choose) just add such a wonderful layer of flavor and aroma when you bite into an eggplant or olive. You can choose another dry white wine such as a Sauvigon Blanc or a Chardonnay but choose a wine that you would drink and consider the flavors they'd impart.

The homegrown eggplants freshly picked at the height of the plant's production, sliced and salted overnight to remove all the bitterness from them. Then they are rinsed and squeezed dried until they are ready to go into the vinegar/wine mixture. The small, meaty diameter of the Japanese eggplants work much better than the usual fat eggplants used in Italian cooking.

The nasturtium capers are made from nasturtium seed pods. You can find a recipe online if you type in "Poor Man's Capers". If you have a garden you should definitely plant nasturtiums, and if you have nasturtiums you should definitely make these since a healthy nasturtium plant will produce hundreds of seeds in the spring. You can also go scavenging for them around town. In San Diego you can see them blooming everywhere in the spring. They have a wonderful peppery crunch to them with a sweet floral flavor to them. Although the flavor is very unique they are as versatile in the kitchen as regular capers.

Last year when I made this I used only kalamata olives and everything purple... after a few weeks the whole thing looked kinda blah. This time I hit up the Whole Foods olive bar and used a variety of different olives. When I was in Italy last fall I learned that each type of olive has a unique flavor and that the flavors change as the olives change from green to black. Some olives are peppery, grassy, bright, floral, etc all which are imparted into the preserve. If you're a purist then stick with one type of olive. I liked the colors, shapes, and sizes of the variety of olives, but according to an Italian, mixing that many different types dilutes the unique flavors of them all.

My stove top set up when pickling.

Ingredients

The vegetables boiled in the vinegar mixture for 5 minutes

Into the jars. Filled them with oil and put them through the water bath.