Saturday, 22 December 2018

Are pickles healthy?

Frederick Poor

Frederick Poor
Answered Nov 25, 2016
Originally Answered: Are pickles healthy?
The health benefits of pickles include a good supply of essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, contributes to modest diabetes control, improved digestion, liver protection, a supply of probiotics, and the ability to heal ulcers.

Pickles And Pickling Process

Pickling is one of the oldest methods of food preservation. Before the invention of modern refrigeration, pickling was the only way to preserve various foods for future consumption. Generally, pickling began as a method to preserve foods that are either exotic or seasonal and limited by nature and cultivation.

The process of pickling can be generally traced back to India, as it is believed to have originated about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. With hot summers and a lack of water during summers, food production decreases during the summer. Thus, there is a need to preserve excess food produced during winters and hence, the process of pickling was invented to overcome this problem.

The traditional way of preparing long-lasting pickles in the Oriental style uses ingredients such as salt, oil, and dry chilli powder mixed with condiments. These ingredients are added according to set proportions. The proportions are meant to cancel out the other’s effect on taste.

Indian Pickles

In India, unripe fruits such as mangoes, Indian gooseberry, unripe tamarinds, and lemons are traditionally used. Apart from these, various vegetables such as gherkin, bitter gourd, carrots, cauliflower, ginger garlic, onion, jackfruit, and citron are also pickled. In most cases, only one vegetable or unripe fruit is used for pickling. But occasionally, a mix of two or more vegetables or unripe fruits were also made. Generally, pickles made from vegetables and unripe fruits are prepared with the utmost care so that they cannot spoil and be preserved all year long. Non-vegetarian pickles are also popular. These pickles are made from chicken, fish, prawns, and mutton.

Chinese Pickles

In Asian countries such as China, pickles are very popular and have also been prepared for thousands of years. Chinese pickles include vegetables such as cabbage, lettuce, yellow tea melon, cucumber, carrots, and shallots. These and other vegetables are added with sugar and salt and put in vinegar. Apart from vegetables, eggs (particularly duck eggs) are stored by applying salt, earth, hay and other ingredients and sealed to mature for about one month. Some pickling processes include soy sauce for fermentation instead of vinegar and in other varieties, condiments such as ginger, garlic, chilli, or peppercorns are also added for a hot and characteristic flavour.

Korean Pickles

In Korea, Kimchi is a common pickled product that is made with fermented spicy cabbage and it also includes a wide variety of vegetables including soy beans, fish, oysters and many different ingredients are used. Korean pickling process owes its origins to Chinese, but unlike the common Chinese cabbage pickles, the Korean pickling process has its own variations according to the local flavour and available ingredients. Korean pickling processes usually involve two types, one in which the ingredients along with spicy chilli pastes are fermented, while the other involves milder varieties pickled in water.

https://www.quora.com/Are-pickles-healthy-for-you

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