Milkweed bud pickling test: shocked bud, bud with heated pickle juice, bud with room temperature juice.
The milkweed plants near us are budding and I picked a pint or so to experiment with. My goal was to come up with something I could add to a pickle plate, which meant a cluster of buds with a bit of the stem to use as a handle. Thus my strategy was different from the (not that many) folks who are attracted by the bud’s similarity to a caper berry.
Milkweed buds. The plants are easy to identify because of the opposed paddle-shape leaves.
I did three tests. For the first, I followed the advice of a forager’s website that looked like something from the 1990s, complete with the unreadable headline over a busy background. I washed the bunches of buds, blanched them, then gave them a shock in ice water. They were drained and the next day I immersed them in the pleasantly mild juice from a tub of Grillo’s half sours.
These buds had lost their crispness by the time they were done with their shock treatment, so I tried two more ways with fresh buds. One was immersed in boiling pickle juice, the other in room temperature juice. In each case I waited 24 hours to taste.
Pickled milkweed buds from the shock treatment test. The pink color is from the buds themselves.
The result? All were fine but the bud that had hot juice poured over it was the best. The shocked buds tasted mostly like pickle juice. The buds that had not been exposed to heat had a not-unpleasant vegetal taste but didn’t taste much like pickles. The pour over buds were just right—crisp, pickley and with just a bit of their own flavor. Going to make up a batch of those.
Milkweed is a butterfly’s delight that grows wild in our part of the country, and this is a particularly abundant year. The plants are easy to identify by the paddle-shape leaves that grow opposite each other on the stem. A few years back we experimented with milkweed bud fritters and also sautéed up some young milkweed shoots. The plant is supposedly edible at every stage, so we still have milkweed flowers and milkweed pods to go.
We’ll have to try milkweed flowers next, and maybe some lacto-fermented buds.
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