Recipe: Purple Pickled Eggs

With Easter just around the corner, this has been on my mind — eggs pickled in beet kvass. I love beets and beet kvass and I thought the combination of beets and hard boiled eggs would work well. The traditional way to pickle eggs is in a brine made of salt and vinegar.

In Chinese culture, the century egg or pidan , is also known as preserved egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg, and millennium egg. This involves preserving the raw eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice hulls for several weeks to several months, depending on the method of processing. The yolk turns green and the white turns brown. I’m not sure I could handle that, and I’m too impatient to wait around a hundred years for it to be ready, so it’s pretty, purple, pickled, hardboiled eggs for me.

Pickled eggs were popular in the middle ages and into the early 1800′s. It was a very common pub food that went well with a glass of ale or bitters. Even in this country, pickled eggs were quite the rage in pubs and bars until the 1970′s. However, there are still some companies that make them, along with other pickled foods like pickled meats, sauerkraut and… pickles!

I prefer to pickle foods with something that actually adds value to it — lacto fermentation. This will add to the flavor and, of course by using the lacto fermentation method, you are adding beneficial bacteria to the food. This is good for the gut and a good way to preserve the food.

Purple Pickled Eggs

Ingredients

• 3 cups of beet kvass (how to make beet kvass)
• 6 pastured hard boiled eggs (pastured if possible)
• 3 thin slices of raw onion
• 6 allspice berries (where to buy spices)

Instructions

1. Place the onion and allspice berries in the bottom of a wide mouth one quart mason jar
2. Place the peeled eggs in the jar
3. Pour the beet kvass to cover the eggs and fill the jar leaving 1 inch from the top
4. Secure the jar with a lid
5. Place in the refrigerator for 3 – 4 days
6. Keep refrigerated and eat within a week

Related articles about lacto fermentation:

• Preserving Tradition with Lacto Fermentation
• 8 Reasons to Add Fermented Foods to Your Diet
• Lacto Fermentation as Preservative: Old as the Hills
• Getting Started with Cultured Foods

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Tagged as: eggs, fermentation, pickled eggs