Pickled Watermelon Rind

Pickled Watermelon Rind

This reminds me of a lot of many of the pickled dishes I grew up with, and which I miss eating.

Brad’s coworker Amelia recently wrote a post where she mentioned pickling being a lost art, and particularly the sad waste of throwing watermelon rinds away. And somewhere in there, I recollected an Asian pickled dish I’d eaten in summers past. This is one I particularly enjoy because the light sweetness of watermelon harmonizes so well with the vinegar and salt.

From Lily’s Hearth and Home blog:

Ingredients:

Watermelon rind (skin removed)

Salt

Sugar

Sambal Olek

Vinegar

Method:

Cut watermelon rind into 1 inch length and 1/4 inch thick pieces

Sprinkle salt and leave aside for 30 minutes.

Wash away salt.

Add vinegar, sambal olek and sugar (adjust to your taste)

Leave to marinate for at least 1 hour before serving.

Some Jelly Roll Ideas.

After talking with Brittany, I thought about how I really wanted rolls that would truly stand out. Also, per my last experiment, I realized that the usual jelly roll with jam was going to yield incredibly small jelly rolls. I’m thinking, however, that it might be good to increase the amount of filling in the middle to kind of flesh it out a bit. This beautiful jelly roll is a good example of what I mean:

Also, in reading some of the recipes, I’ve discovered that frosting commonly comes with butter, but that an acceptable alternative could be more cream cheese (beaten until smooth). So I found several recipes that sound pretty neat and worth trying out, but with some minor edits to the overall recipe:

Pumpkin Roll with Cream Cheese filling :  my edits would be to add the nuts to the cream rather than to the cake.

Chocolate/Espresso jelly roll with green tea and matcha filling :  my edits would be to turn it into a jelly roll… make a pan of it, then add the matcha on top, and the green tea frosting on top of that.

Red Wine Cake and Cream Cheese :  my edit would be using white wine (sauvignon blanc) with a chocolate cream frosting (from here).

Vanilla Cream Roll :  provides the baseline for all the recipes

Carrot Cake and Cream Cheese :  for the kids!

Strawberry Jelly Roll :  there isn’t anything fancy about this, except that perhaps we could flavor the filling with mango/kiwi instead?

Key Lime Jelly Roll :  Maybe I can do a lime one with sweet jasmine-flavored cream. Will have to find jasmine syrup though.

What about strawberry cake with black sesame frosting? Might be something to look into.

More to come; some good places to look might be in the paste sections, food pairings, and jellies.