Opening-Day Hot Dog Relish

Five years ago, I got delicious, sugary, American-style pickle relish from a German grocery Discounter during their annual “American”-food week, for about an Euro. It tasted like the cheap stuff my Dad bought from the same Discounter when I was growing up in Iowa, minus the neon-green food coloring. I only need it a couple times a year for baseball hot dogs, but with so much sugar and vinegar, it was still fine to eat after years in the fridge.

But nothing lasts forever. This year, there was no relish offered for sale at this Discounter. As I cleaned the fridge, panic set in.

Tough choice: Pay 8€ for a jar of name-brand imported pickle relish at a specialty shop, or buy out-of-season ingredients for more money and make my own. OK, more of an obvious choice.

Pickle relish was developed to take advantage of the August glut of cucumbers, and make them shelf-stable so they could be enjoyed in winter. All the recipes I found started with ten pounds of cucumbers… At this time of year/German inflationary history, a single cucumber at the farmers market costs the same amount as a jar of six “American-style” hot dogs. Panic was turning quickly to despair…then there was a sale at the grocery store in the neighborhood and I scored three cukes for 3€. I weighed them, and adjusted a random recipe down.

Then I embarked on a five-day, six-store search for celery seed. Like lemongrass, it’s a component of a thousand pre-mixes, but nearly impossible to find alone. Why waste shelf space with pure spices when your preferred customers want a nebulous “Tofu-Seasoning” at twice the profit? Finally, my Saturday morning spice dealer came through with a 3€-baggie. It’s sitting in the cupboard next to the Baharat.

Simultaneously, I hunted down appropriate salt. “Pickling salt” turns up “Pökelsalz“, which is nitrates for sausage-making. Useful but wrong. I settled for “rustic Alpine salt“–from a mine that Mr Radish and I visited in 2008. Life is a series of circles.

The first step is “run all your vegetables through the food processor.”

I do not have a food processor.

I watched the whole History Time podcast on the Sea Peoples while I chopped.

Then I added the salt and some water, and let it sit overnight.

Next day, as I drained off the brine, I thought about saving some of it to make salad dressing, but if I do that, then I will have to make salads, so forget it!

Into the pot, along with vinegar, mustard seed, turmeric, celery seed, and what seemed like a lot of sugar at the time.

It boils a long time, then you add cornstarch, then it boils some more.

The good news: I have three half-liter jars of hot-dog relish!
The bad news: I have three half-liter jars of hot-dog relish!

It’s good; spicier than the commercial variant, but not very sweet at all. Next time–I’m thinking August 2024–I will adjust the recipe down to one cucumber, chop it even smaller, and add more sugar. I put one jar in the freezer; I don’t know if the texture will hold through a freeze-thaw cycle, but I’m willing to take the risk in order to find out. The other two jars are ready for Opening Day. I have also been eating it on bread smeared with cream cheese. The race to finish it before it goes fuzzy is on!

Meanwhile, I am looking for more recipes that use celery seed. And Baharat.