Can you pickle magnolia petals?

Pickled Magnolia Petals.

Can you pickle magnolia blossoms or petals? According to the Smithsonian, magnolia trees date back as far as 95 million years, a time when there were no bees. They were instead pollinated by beetles and the magnolia developed thick petals to support the critters. It’s those thick petals that make magnolia blossoms an interesting candidate for pickling.

By May 4, most of our magnolia petals were on the ground.

We have a “precocious” magnolia tree in our parkway, meaning it blooms before leaves appear in the spring. This year the bloom started maybe April 30 and is already almost over on May 4. Before we ran out of time, we wanted to see if magnolia blossoms could be pickled. We were inspired when the petals were listed among edible local plants on the Foraged New York Foray sponsored by Collar City Mushrooms.

It’s easy to harvest pristine magnolia blossoms because they literally fall off the tree; just hold a large basket below a clump of flowers and shake the branch. You’ll be rewarded with a shower of pink petals that will quickly produce a gallon or more by volume. As a precautionary measure (certainly not necessary since they never touched the ground and would be subject to a hot pickling brine) we soaked them briefly and dried them in a salad spinner. That’s when we discovered that magnolia blossoms bruise very easily, producing a dark crack across the petal.

Various online foragers and vegan experimenters suggest that pickled magnolia leaves have a taste of ginger, and in fact can be substituted for gari as a garnish for sushi. This inspired us to prepare a pickling liquid which included a teaspoon of minced fresh ginger along with a garlic clove and a star anise, plus a teaspoon of Kosher salt and a tablespoon of sugar, in a 50/50 mix of white vinegar and water with a total volume of 2 cups.

It seemed like a good idea to stack the magnolia petals to keep them intact, so we made several piles and carefully inserted them into a wide mouth quart canning jar. At some point, we lost patience and dumped in the rest of the petals. What had been a gallon in the basket just about filled the quart jar with closely packed petals. We heated the pickling brine to just below boiling, poured over the petals, and waited.

Here’s our pickled magnolia blossoms after a night in the brine. Note the considerable bruising and also how the liquid has been tinted pink.

The next morning we tried our newly pickled magnolia petals. The first thing we noticed was that the petals come out of the jar in sort of a gummy mass…. Not particularly appetizing. They tasted pleasant but the flavor was from the brine; the petals themselves didn’t have much flavor and certainly not a hint of ginger. Thinking of the gari analogy, we sliced one of the blobs into slivers. At least half the petals had turned a dark color so we discarded those leaving the pickles you see above. Not bad at all.

Next year we might try this again; we’ll slice the petals before pickling and hopefully will have less bruising and discoloring. We might also consider using the fresh, unpickled magnolia blossoms as a garnish.