Difficulty level Easy

I've had pickled fiddleheads many times, but I've always bought them from Forbes Wild Foods. It wasn't until I spent the entire summer last year pickling and preserving, that I realized that I could actually do it myself. So this weekend, I undertook my first pickling of the year and produced six jars of asparagus, four jars of fiddleheads and one of wild leeks.

As with most pickling and preserving the real work is getting the fruit or vegetables cleaned and chopped. There is a bit of labour involved in cleaning fiddleheads. There is a brown, papery membrane that must be removed, otherwise you end up with bitter fiddleheads. I find the easiest way to do this is to put the fiddleheads in a brown paper bag and give them a good shake. After doing this a few times, most of the stuff is removed. Then I just wash them carefully.

If you need a refresher course, or you are canning for the first time, look back at my Preserving the Harvest series from last year which covers 4 Ways to Preserve, the Equipment You Need, and the actual Procedure.

This recipe is adapted from the website Fat of the Land. If you are interested in foraging for food and then learning about what to do with it (or just reading about someone else's adventures), this is a great resource. I wish I'd found his recipe for Dandelion Jelly in time this year, but they were all gone to seed by the time I read it. Oh well, next year.

I doubled this recipe because I had two pounds of fiddleheads and I ended up with four pint jars, although I might have packed them more tightly and had three jars instead. A lot of my fiddleheads were quite small, and perhaps that made a difference. I made two changes to the original recipe. A number of cookbooks and websites devoted to pickling and preserving suggested that it is better to use concentrated lemon juice rather than actual lemons because you can measure the amount of juice required more acurately, and acid levels can fluctuate and concentrated lemon juice provides a more consistent level. Because I used concentrate, I left out the lemon zest. I was also nervous about putting the fiddleheads into the jars raw. Uncooked fiddleheads can cause stomach cramps and diarrhea. Perhaps the water bath would be enough to cook them, but I decided to play it safe and I blanched them for about 3 minutes, then drained them and ran cold water over them to stop the cooking.

INGREDIENTS