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Fermented Japanese Quince Pickle

I love lime pickle but I love my Japanese Quince pickle even more! Lime pickle is great, it smacks your taste buds all over the place and I like that, it's salty, sour, tart, citrusy and then those spices come in to play with that amazing heat toward to the end. So after last years Japanese Quince harvest (end October, early November) an idea struck me, why not make a pickle akin to lime pickle, quince are tart and have that sour, citrus appeal but with a more delicious attitude, so I set about making one. After chopping and removing the seeds, I salted the quince to start a short fermentation process, I later added a range of spices and have left it alone ever since (well, not quite true, I have had a few sneak previews to taste how it's been getting along, who wouldn't and besides, I'm making it  ). The initially hard quince have softened nicely and they have become beautifully infused with the spices while retaining that distinctive quince flavour and aroma. Fermented they really do retain that extra quince edge which changes ever so slightly when they are cooked. All in all I'm happy with the results. I may blitz some into paste form, I think that could be a great marinade to put onto fish and meat prior to cooking or bbq'ing, let playtime commence... 












This is the finished pickle on the left (not the best light available to day so it looks a touch on the dark side but it's actually not much brighter in colour in real life). I've chopped it up finer than I had originally done so when first setting about making it. Part of the reason was to do with the hard texture of the quince - I had lots to chop down and it's not the easiest task. I had also preempted that the quince would soften as they fermented and that I could make the pieces smaller at a later date. So far, I've only used it as you would lime pickle, with poppadoms - how creative 😂😂😂! I'm looking forward to playing and experimenting to find out just where it works best.

Even though I picked the quince in October/November last year, this experiment has been slowly sat doing it's thing and that's why I didn't add it to my larger article on Japanese Quince which can be found here: https://edible-leeds.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/quince-quince-glorious-quince.html 

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