We got a fair few carrots from our CSA. They’re delicious raw or sliced into coins and glazed in a pan. Even their greens are tasty, if you treat them properly. But the focus of this post is preservation: pickled carrots.

We had a bunch of beautiful orange and purple carrots—about a pound and a half each. As usual, our recipe is based on one from the NCHFP. We wanted a lot of spices to play against the natural carrot sweetness, so we used mustard and coriander seeds, along with some heat from the Peruvian purple peppers we grow. But the real kicker were the fresh umbels from our garden.

No, it’s nothing to do with Uriah Heep. Umbels are a kind of inflorescence, common to lots of plants in Apiaceae. In fact, umbels are so common in that family that it’s also called “umbel-bearing”, Umbelliferae. We had dill and fennel umbels to split up among the jars.

Here are the notes—almost a recipe, if you squint. We definitely cooked them only briefly, less than the 10 minutes suggested by the NCHFP.

1lb 9.3oz orange
1lb 7oz purple

5.5C cider vinegar
1C water
2C sugar
2t Morton’s kosher salt
7g (~2t) mustard seed
9g (~4t) coriander seed
3 peruvian purple peppers

fennel and dill blossoms in the jars
fennel gets 3 bonus peppers

added 1.5x of vinegar, water, sugar, and salt for purple carrots with about 3C of leftover brine
+ 1t each fennel and corianer seeds, refresh 3 peppers
5 extra peppers in each jar

made 2qts orange, 1.75qt purple (?! probably more tightly packed)

These are tart pickles, not too sweet, with lots of great flavor from the seeds, especially the umbels. I imagine these would cut right through fatty braised brisket or hot pastrami, roasted pork belly, or seared duck breasts.