Zucchini is a variation of zucchini that differs from the usual vegetable in the dark green color of the peel, lack of tendency to grow to gigantic proportions and a more delicate taste. Of these fruits, you can cook a salad, a snack, and as a preparation for the winter - pickle or pickle. This review contains the best recipes for preparing homemade preserves from zucchini with detailed instructions for each dish.
Selection and preparation of ingredients
For canning, fully ripe mid-season or late varieties of zucchini are best suited. It is important to remember that young zucchini contains a minimal amount of fiber, but there is more sugar in it than in overripe fruits. Therefore, the "old" zucchini for salting is not suitable: in finished form they will not be pleasant to crackle, in addition, voids often form in them.
Important! Zucchini, as well as zucchini and cucumbers, is very capricious in canning: preparations using this vegetable often become cloudy and explode. Therefore, sterilization of cans, as a preparatory stage, should be carried out especially carefully.
Many housewives, before starting to cook zucchini or cucumbers for the winter, soak the fruits in cold water and leave for several hours, and the water needs to be changed periodically.
This method allows you to solve two problems: firstly, when soaking, the main part of the nitrates contained in the fruits goes into the water (especially important if vegetables were purchased at the market or in the store, rather than grown on their own beds), secondly, from water, both cucumbers and zucchini, become dense and elastic, which means that the finished dish from them will turn out more delicious.
Zucchini zucchini harvesting recipes for the winter
You can cook zucchini for the winter in different ways. The most popular options are salting and pickling, a no less famous snack is squash caviar, but there are more interesting and original recipes, and in each of them the universal vegetable “sounds” in its own way.
Did you know? The word zucchini comes from the Italian zucca, that is, pumpkin. Zucchini, in fact, are the closest relatives of pumpkin, as well as melons, watermelon and cucumber, although people who are familiar only with the fruits of these plants are hard to believe in such a relationship.
We offer the hostess three ways to prepare a winter snack: classic pickled zucchini straws, a spicy salad with honey dressing and Moldavian pickling. In all these recipes, ordinary zucchini can be used as the main ingredient, but with zucchini the dish will turn out to be more tender.
Classic recipe
5 cans of 0.5 l2 hours
sugar
6 tbsp (1.5 cups)
table vinegar (9%)
250 ml
Energy value per 100 g:
- Wash the zucchini, peel, cut each fruit in length into two parts and then, each half into three parts. Cut the resulting fragments into strips along the length, trying so that the pieces are not too small. Wash carrots, peel and cut into rings.
- Peel the garlic, peel, cut into thin slices. Peel the onion, cut into thin half rings.
- Fill the preparation in sterile (preferably still hot) jars in the following order: both types of pepper, bay leaf and mustard seeds are laid on the bottom, then onions, carrots, garlic and dill follow.
- Zucchini appear as the top layer - if possible, they should be laid as tightly as possible so that there are few voids in the bank. To do this, the straw is best laid vertically.
- Combine water with vinegar, add salt and sugar to the resulting marinade, mix well, put on fire, bring to a boil, stirring occasionally to make the liquid homogeneous.
- Pour jars of boiled marinade, trying to pour liquid on vegetables, not on the walls of dishes, otherwise the glass may crack. Cover the cans with lids, but do not roll up.
- Fill the bottom of a large thick-walled pan with a towel, then pour water into the pan and place cans in it so that the water reaches ¾ of the container height.
- Put the pan on the fire, cover, bring to a boil and simmer on low heat for 30 minutes. If the capacity of the cans exceeds 0.5 l, the sterilization time should be proportionally increased.
- Remove cans from boiling water, immediately roll up the lids. After that, turn each container upside down and carefully inspect for leaks (if necessary, squeeze the lid). Leave the cans upside down to cool completely.
Important! Carrots for this recipe are better to choose a cylindrical rather than conical shape, so that the slices look the same.
Video recipe
Classic Recipe Video Recipe: Classic Recipe
Did you know? The largest zucchini in the world was grown 20 years ago by an Englishman named John Handbury. This amazing fruit weighed 61 kg 230 g.
With honey
Cilantro and dill in this recipe can be replaced with other herbs, such as basil, celery or tarragon, but parsley must be present without fail.
5-62 hours
apple or white wine vinegar
3 tbsp
Energy value per 100 g:
- Wash, dry the zucchini, after which, without peeling, cut into small slices. For slicing, you can use the housekeeper potato peeler or a special knife. It is important that the strips are very thin, like tissue paper.
- Salt the prepared zucchini and leave for 30 minutes so that the vegetables let the juice.
- If sugared honey is used, heat it until a liquid consistency is obtained.
- Combine honey with vinegar and mix well the resulting sauce with a spoon.
- Peel the garlic, peel and chop finely.
- Wash and chop greens.
- Add greens and garlic to the sauce, mix again.
- Drain the juice from the zucchini and add the marinade to them.
- Arrange the appetizer in prepared sterile jars, pour oil on top.
- Cover the cans with lids pretreated with boiling water, but do not roll up.
- Put a thick towel at the bottom of a large thick-walled pan, fill it with water, and place the jars of salad inside so that the water reaches 2/3 of their height.
- Put the pan on the fire, cover, bring to a boil, simmer over low heat for 30 minutes - for cans of 0.5 l. If the container is 1 liter, sterilization time should be increased to 45 minutes.
- Carefully remove the cans from the pan, roll up the lids, turn the neck down and, making sure that there is no leak, allow to cool completely.
Zucchini prepared in this way can be consumed fresh without heat treatment, in which case they will be an excellent alternative to any seasonal vegetable salad.
Moldovan salty
For salting, it is desirable to choose small fruits of the same size.
30-4060 minutes
dill with umbrellas
1 large bunch
tarragon (tarragon)
1 bunch
blackcurrant leaves
10-15 pieces
Energy value per 100 g:
- Dissolve the salt in water, bring to a boil, strain and allow to cool to room temperature.
- Wash greens, discard in a colander, allow water to drain.
- Peel the garlic into its cloves, peel them, cut each clove in half lengthwise.
- Cut the chili peppers into 2–3 parts or leave whole (in the first case, the snack will be more spicy).
- Wash the zucchini and remove the stalks. Using a fork, make several punctures in each vegetable to ensure better penetration of the brine into the fetus.
- At the bottom of a wooden tub or ceramic container with a wide neck, lay part of the herbs and spices. Put a layer of zucchini on top. Continue filling the tub with layers, alternating spices and vegetables. Top with greens.
- Fill the container with cold brine.
- Cover the surface of the tub with a piece of gauze folded in several layers, put a wooden cutting board, a shallow plate or other flat shape on top, on which to put the oppression (in this quality you can use a jar of water, an athletic weight or other suitable load.
- Put the container in a warm place for several days until the fermentation process starts.
- A few days later, when foam appears over the gauze, remove the container into the cellar or other cool place for 3-4 weeks. Periodically, gauze must be removed and rinsed with running water, since it is on it that pathogenic fungi can accumulate, competing with dairy bacteria, providing fermentation.
An authentic Moldovan recipe lacks such an ingredient as horseradish. However, adding chopped peeled root or leaves of this fragrant spice chopped in small pieces will provide the zucchini with the very crunch that any housewife wants to achieve.
Did you know? Zucchini is edible and useful not only fruits, but also flowers: many dishes are prepared from them, and this ingredient is not used raw, as it might seem, but fried. It is interesting that male flowers are used in cooking, so this process does not affect the yield of zucchini.
Features of storage of blanks
You can store home spins for up to two years, although it is advisable to make stocks so that they are fully used until the beginning of the appearance of fresh seasonal vegetables, and new stocks are made from raw materials of the current year.
It is not necessary to keep preservation performed in compliance with the technology in the refrigerator or cellar, room temperature is also suitable for this, but it is very desirable that it be stable, and the place where the containers with stocks are installed is dark and protected from drafts.
Important! Before installing blanks in a place of permanent storage, it is advisable to observe them for 3-4 weeks. If the lid remains drawn into the can and the contents of the container do not become cloudy and do not form a precipitate - the workpiece is suitable for long-term savings, otherwise it should be opened and, depending on the condition of the salting, use or discard.
Zucchini is an exceptionally tasty and healthy vegetable, from which, in addition, you can cook a huge number of a variety of dishes, including preparations for the winter. And although home canning is quite a painstaking process and requires the observance of many important rules, any housewife can master it, and the result of this work is definitely worth the effort put into it. After all, no pickles bought in a supermarket or on the market can be compared with a product of their own production, prepared from high-quality raw materials, without the use of chemical additives and, most importantly, with love.