On 2012-05-08 03:55:41 +0000, gtr said:

> On 2012-05-08 03:17:18 +0000, Jean B. said:
>
>> I've never liked sweet pickles, and really hate it when someone puts
>> them in tuna salad or especially in potato salad since it pretty much
>> ruins it for me.
>>
>> Same here. Yuck! And it happens so often.
>
> Can't say I've ever had much of these. So I'm willing to try. I just
> pickled some green beans using Samuelsson's 3-2-1 pickle. 3 Cups
> water, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup vinegar. I've never put sugar in a pickling
> before.

Okay, debrief:

For reference, it's Marcus Samuelsson's pickling from his book Aquavit
as found various places including he http://tinyurl.com/7jcdf3y

I only had raw organic cane sugar so its the shade of ice tea. Not so
appealing. The okra I picked up at the Indian market when I got the
falafel mix*. It was really pretty and had no age spots. Looked very
fresh and much better than I usually see in the non-ethnic
supermarkets. It is, though, the toughest most fibrous okra I may ever
have had. I'm beginning to doubt its species.

Someone said I should parboil the green beans. Yes, I should have.

So they were both failures. The pickling though, was pretty nice and
not hardly so sweet as I feared it might be. I wonder if that's due to
using unprocessed raw sugar being less pushy?

I don't know if I'm violating a basic rule of pickling, but I intend to
fish out the string beans and okra and dunk a number of slabs of
cabbage and see what I get for my effort.

* I know that falafel is not an Indian dish, but the store sells falafel mixes