Recently, I attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, a weekend-long conference devoted to all aspects of food. As part of the Symposium, the attendees are served meals prepared by international chefs that are always a culinary experience.

During the Sunday lunch, an amazing Ploughman’s array, one of the accompaniments was a dish of pickled kohlrabi (not pictured) Apparently the food producers slipped in a case of the kohlrabi into the transport van before the organizers could stop them! I had never eaten kohlrabi before, and the lurid pink kohlrabi pickles resembled pickled turnip, which I am indifferent toward. So I was a little sceptical.

However, the kohlrabi were delicious. Crunchy. Salty. Tangy. And something I knew I wanted to replicate at home.

Enter the experiment.

Experimental Pickled Kohlrabi

1 cup white vinegar
1 cup water
2 tbsp salt
2 tsp sugar (or more, to taste)
1 bay leaf
1 garlic clove, sliced in half
2 beets, quartered
1 lb kohlrabi (approximately 3 kohlrabi)

Mix the vinegar and water with the salt, water, garlic, and bay leaf. Adjust the sugar to taste. If you like a less salty pickle, increase the water to 2 cups.

Add beets to the mixture. Make sure the salt and sugar are fully dissolved.

Cut peel from kohlrabi. Slice into thick matchsticks, approximately one half inch wide. Add kohlrabi to the brine, and place in fridge to pickle. The kohlrabi will need to sit several days in the pickle brine in the fridge in order to have the salt, vinegar, and the pink from the beets penetrate through it. They should be ready to eat after 3-4 days. The longer the kohlrabi sits, the better they will taste!

Pickles should last a month or more in the fridge—if you don’t eat them all first! The above picture shows pickles after 1 week of brining. Next time, I think I will double the recipe because the pickled kohlrabi were so tasty I have been eating them everyday!