Caitlin Ruth: Pickling to tickle your taste buds

The West Cork-based chef has had a long love affair with pickling and preserving - learn how to avoid food waste, save money and make something delicious with her debut cookbook ‘Funky’

Chef Caitlin Ruth is an advocate of home-pickled food, which was part of her childhood diet. Picture: Clare Keogh

“Irish people love pickles, but they don’t know it.”

As far as West Cork-based chef Caitlin Ruth is concerned, everyone has their own pickle story — even if they haven’t quite realised it yet. After all, even tomato ketchup is a pickle, be it an ever so humble example. 

In 1980s Ireland, we had pickled beetroot (divisive) and pickled onions (addictive), and after Darina Allen’s first Simply Delicious TV series was aired in 1990, everyone discovered the joys of a quick cucumber pickle.

Ruth’s love for and devotion to pickles is something that has travelled with her through many kitchens. 

From New Hampshire, in the US, she has lived in Ireland since 1992 and has been a stalwart of the West Cork restaurant scene for many years. 

Ruth initially worked in Lettercollum House before becoming head chef at Dillon’s in Timoleague, where she spent nine years. 

For the next 16 years, she was head chef at Deasy’s Restaurant near Clonakilty and she now has her own food truck — Caitlin Ruth Food — with a focus on producing seasonal, local dishes for private catering, events and festivals. There’s invariably something pickled on the menu.

“I’ve always loved pickles,” says Ruth. “Preservation was part of our diet at home, with my Mom always canning, freezing, and pickling.”

While she wouldn’t have counted herself as a pickle aficionado growing up, she was exposed to a wider range of preserves than most kids, including traditional bread and butter pickles (which contain cucumber, rather than bread or butter), dill pickles, dilly beans and pickled sausages. “I grew up with those, the rest I evolved into.”

In common with most children, Ruth didn’t appreciate the fact that her mother grew, preserved and cooked healthy food for the family. 

“I did love a bread and butter pickle but wanted the fun stuff — especially sugary cereal like Fruity Pebbles, Lucky Charms — and cookies. We had carob instead of chocolate and roasted soybeans instead of salted peanuts. I always wanted choc chip cookies but Mom was pretty health conscious and she just made raisin cookies…the sad cousin of the choc chip. They’re just not the same thing.”

All that childhood exposure to good food paid off when she became a chef. Starting her career in food in the States, Ruth made pickles as part of her cheffing job but it wasn’t until she was in her own restaurant kitchen that her pickle adventures really took off: “I was working at Dillon’s from the mid-1990s to 2003 and that’s when I fell in love with pickling as a means of preservation.

She was in direct contact with West Cork growers and could see how much work they put into producing food. 

She could not resist the opportunity to take vegetable gluts off their hands: “I love to support local growers. I love working with them and the challenge of them growing too much. I hate saying no. I was always taking 10kg of this and 20kg of that, then I had to find different ways of making it last.”

As she writes in Funky (Blasta Books), her just-released bright, bold little cookbook about pickles and preserving, everyone loves those first precious little courgettes in July but when the large boxes of mixed-size courgettes turn up in August, there are few takers.

One of her “glut buster” ideas for courgettes is to turn them into a bread and butter pickle by subbing in courgette for cucumber and eating them with burgers, sandwiches, meat terrines, or salads. 

She buys 15kg of cayenne peppers at a time from a local grower, fermenting and pickling them — both recipes are in the book - to last for 12 months, until the end of the next growing season.

Pickling turns perishable vegetables into something that will happily stick around in their jars for months. It’s ideal for gardeners struggling with gluts, people who acquire unexpected bounty in their vegetable boxes and anyone who likes adding what Ruth calls “the zingy contrast to your food.”

It’s not complicated either. Ruth has a 10-minute pickle project to start people maximising excess vegetables in their home kitchen. 

“Let’s say that you’re making a stir fry and you’ve shopped for organic vegetables: a red onion, green onions, green beans, red pepper. People just use half of each, put the rest back into the veg drawer and that gets thrown away a week later when it’s all furry,” says Ruth. 

But she has a simple solution to this waste of both food and money: “Take all the veg you might not use, slice it and put it in a jar. When that’s full of sliced veg, pour in enough vinegar to fill two-thirds of the jar, top with water, then pour that liquid out, boil it up with a little caster sugar and salt and pour it back over the veg. Wait a couple of days and then you have an amazing mixed pickle ready for a sandwich, to put in a salad or to chop finely and mix with olive oil and herbs for a dip.”

While Ruth is keen to point out that she’s coming at pickles from a flavour-first perspective, she notes that “as far as gut health goes, fermented food is good for the microbiome”. 

She’s a fan of what she calls “the pungent fermented pickle and the zingy vinegar pickle,” depending on what vegetable she’s using.

Particular vegetables are better suited to one method than the other. But some, like chillis, work with both. “We’re using whole food, we’re using vegetables and if you’ve grown [the produce] yourself, even better,” says Ruth.

“You can also make the most of organic vegetables that you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of sourcing. When you pickle, there’s no food waste and you save money.”

But it’s all about how it tastes: “I’m coming at it from a chef’s perspective and focusing on flavour and contrast,” Ruth adds. “I don’t love sauerkraut because it’s healthy. I love it because it is crunchy and zingy — it being good for you is just an extra advantage.”

Caitlin Ruth's Better Beetroot Pickle

The supermarket jars of sliced beetroot pickles have turned a lot of people (including my daughter) off beetroot entirely. This pickle – softer, sweeter, spicier – is as different from those jars as it’s possible to get and still be pickled beetroot.

Cooking Time

 10 mins

Total Time

 10 mins

Course

 Main

Ingredients

• 3 tbsp olive oil

• 1kg whole beetroot, peeled and grated – this should give you about 800g

• 150g finely diced red onion

• 425ml distilled white vinegar or white wine vinegar

• 80g caster sugar

• 2 tsp yellow mustard seeds

• 2 tsp sea salt

• 1 tsp fennel seeds

• 1 tsp chilli flakes

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Add the beetroot and red onion and cook for 3 minutes, then add all of the remaining ingredients and simmer for 3 minutes more.

2. Put everything in your dry, sterilised jar leaving 1.5cm of space clear from the rim of the jar to the top of the veg. Cover with a lid and leave to cool before refrigerating. Wait for one week before eating and use within six months.

3. HOW TO EAT

4. This pickle is delicious in an egg salad sandwich and adds beautiful colour. You can also heap it on cheese and crackers or serve it alongside a cold meat terrine.

• Funky by Caitlin Ruth with illustrations by Nicky Hooper (Blasta Books #9, €15) is available in bookshops and independent retailers around Ireland and blastabooks.com