Q I've heard that to make achar crunchy and crispy we need to sun-dry the cucumber, chillies, carrot, cauliflower and cabbage. It's what grandmothers would do. As the weather here is so unpredictable, sunning vegetables is always difficult. What else can I do to maintain the crunch?
Mary Yeo
A Sometimes grandmother knows best. And sometimes, there just aren't any good shortcuts. For the dense, crunchy texture that distinguishes well-made achar, there is no perfect substitute for drying the sliced vegetables on a sunny, breezy day.
Here are some alternatives:
Oven: Lay the vegetables on rattan or bamboo trays, place these on oven racks, turn the oven (on a fan-assisted setting, if possible) to its lowest temperature, leave the door well ajar and let the vegetables dry for two to three hours. The oven temperature must be monitored or you may end up with cooked vegetables.
Fridge: Spread the sliced vegetables on a tray lined with paper towels, cover with a mesh cover and chill in the main section of the fridge (and not the veg drawer) for one to two days until they look parched. The problem with this method is that the vegetables may absorb odours from other ingredients in your fridge.
I am told by American cooks that electric dehydrators, common in the United States but not here, may also be used to dry the vegetables.
Natural sea salt containing magnesium and calcium compounds will make pickles slightly firmer. Alum, an aluminium salt additive, is sometimes used in Western pickle recipes to increase firmness and crunch. However, these are usually juicy fermented pickles, quite different from vinegar-cured, dense achar. Too much alum affects flavour and may even cause indigestion, so I wouldn't recommend this.
Nor would I recommend the practice of soaking the vegetables in diluted alkaline water. This increases firmness but any residual alkalinity after rinsing will partially neutralise the vinegar added later, and the final achar may not be acid enough to prevent bacterial growth.
Crispy goreng pisang tip
WITH all the recent alarm about plasticised fried bananas, it's a good time to recall the Asian trick of adding an acidic ingredient to the wok during deep-frying.
This allegedly prevents the fried food from absorbing too much oil, helping it to be crispy, not greasy.
In my family we use a small ball of assam pulp and some hawkers use cut limes. I don't know of any scientific verification for such an effect, though one could surmise that antioxidants in the fruit might make the heated oil degrade and oxidise more slowly.
