Mango Pickle with Jaggery

- fom Andhra Pradesh -

So today I am sharing one of the most ambitious and interesting recipes I made with my big box of mangoes: Mango Pickle with Jaggery. So first off, a few words on Indian pickles. Though I had always thought I'd had quite a bit of Indian food growing up, the first memory I have of actually trying Indian pickles is from only about a year and a half ago in Indonesia. At some point during my last year there, the wife of one of my colleagues had moved to Jakarta from their home in Chennai to be with him, and he had helped her open a tiffin service for the other Indian teachers at our school (as well as anyone else who just loved Indian fare and wanted to cash in). I don't remember the price exactly, but I think it was 20k or 25k INR per meal, so $2.00 to $3.00 Canadian dollars, and I used to buy her lunches about once a week. They were delicious. One of my favourites was rice with a spicy sour tamarind sauce. Anyway, in each lunch box, she'd give you a generous serving of rice, some combination of vegetables in a sauce, and then some fried papadam, and a little spoonful of this delicious, curious thing that my colleagues called pickle. So whereas back home, pickles usually means dill pickles, which are small cucumbers in a sour, herby brine, Indian pickles are a combination of numerous powerful flavours: they are intensely sour and often very spicy, and preserved in heaps of oil, salt and bold spices. 

I remember that after joining the tiffin club at my school, my friendships with my Indian colleagues changed a little, and some of them who I hadn't known as well opened up a little more with now that they knew I liked Indian food. Soon learned from them that although I'd never even heard of Indian pickles before, they were a pretty big part of Indian cuisine, and my friends generally said they had many varieties of pickles at their homes in Jakarta and would bring back more jars from India every time they returned from their summer or Christmas holidays.

Here in Mumbai I hear a lot of talk about mango pickles, specifically. Apparently there are many varieties, some sweeter, some more sour, and all hailing from different regions of the country. I ordered a Rajasthani mango pickle at the beginning of lockdown from flipkart, and they were pretty nice--extremely sour and quite spicy. And then I decided as mango season came upon us to try making mango pickles myself. 

One of my favourite Indian snacks is thepla (which I will post about soon), an Indian flatbred made of multiple types of flour and flavoured with spices and fresh fenugreek leaves. I fell in love with this at school, because it seemed to be one of the most common things colleagues and students would bring for lunch or snack, and it was always very generously passed around to the rest of us. While thepla is often enjoyed with chai, it is also often eaten with mango pickle. So I initially thought I'd make some mango pickle to have with thepla. That said, I had no idea which mango pickle you are meant to eat with thepla, and when I was on the hunt for a recipe, a friend of mine shared the recipe for this sweet South Indian mango pickle, and I was so intrigued that I just changed my mind and made this one instead. 

So, this mango pickle is best eaten with South Indian foods, and is delicious even just with steamed rice and plain boiled moong dal (which I will later share as well). I have also been eating it with thepla and found that was a wonderful combination also, though I don't know whether or not it's an conventional pairing. 

It took a few days to make, but really all the work that went into it took under 15 minutes. After that, I just let it sit on the counter under a tea towel for 3 days, stirring once or twice a day to keep the ingredients evenly mixed while the flavours developed and deepened. 

This is a very handy way of preserving mangoes if you have somehow found yourself with an extra kg or two of sour ones that you don't have plans for. Since it is basically a canning recipe, if you know how to seal the jars, you could probably do that once the pickle has matured a few days and the flavours are ready. That said, I really don't know how to can yet, and don't even have proper jars, so I just made my pickles and eventually placed them all in jars in the fridge. They will keep for a couple months in the fridge, and can make a great gift if your friends are adventurous eaters.

If you'd like to see the original recipe, it is available here.

Mango Pickle with Jaggery

Ingredients and Steps:

1. Take 

• 5 young (sour) mangoes
  
  > Wash the skins, then carefully remove the fruit from the seeds, leaving the skin intact, and dice the flesh and skin, as shown above. Set aside in a medium bowl. Ideally, you should even include the stones, but I did not as that seemed cumbersome on multiple levels

2. In a large bowl, whisk together:

• 1/2 litre peanut oil (I used sunflower)
• 25g cumin powder
• 50g ginger garlic paste, or pureed ginger and garlic
  
  > Add the diced mangoes to this, and stir to combine

3. Then add: 

• 1 tbsp turmeric
• 250g yellow mustard seeds (I used 200g yellow mustard seeds, and 50g black mustard seeds)
• 250 sea salt (I used finely ground pink himalayan salt)
• 250 red chili powder 
• 25g regular dry chickpeas (these are delicious, so don't skip. You could even add extra)
• 50g garlic cloves, crushed
  
  > Mix all of this thoroughly together

4. In a separate, medium-sized bowl, whisk together:

• 250g jaggery or brown sugar
• 3-4 tbsp oil
  
  > Add this to the pickle as well, and stir everything to combine it fully. 
  
  * Note: do not skimp on the salt or oil as those are the preservatives in the pickle

5. If you have a large pot that will fit all the pickle, you can move the pickle into that now, if not you can use a non-reactive metal bowl as I did. 

6. Cover the top with a clean tea towel or cheese cloth and leave it on a counter near a window for three days to age and pickle itself. The pickle is meant to dry out a bit, so make sure you use a tea towel or or something that will not make it air tight. I actually didn't have a big enough tea towel, so I just set a large piece of parchment paper over the bowl and clipped it on loosely at either end.

7. You can check the taste periodically to see how it changes and also check the textures of the ingredients. You will find that after 3 days, the mango skins should be soft (you just eat them with the pickle once it's ready), and the chickpeas will be soft as well. 

8. Once both the mango skin and chickpeas are soft--about 3 days--you can transfer the pickle to clean glass jars and store them in the fridge.