Recipes with pickled cucumbers

4 recipes that use pickled cucumbers, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Bauru, takes 20 minutes. It is most often cooked with tomato, aleppo pepper or mild chilli flakes and allspice.

Run out of pickled cucumbers? Courgette, same weight.

Got a few things in the fridge? Search by everything you have

Bauru

Late-night students at Largo do Paissandu in São Paulo invented the Bauru in the 1930s, named after the nickname of the friend who ordered it, and the bar where it was born still makes it the original way. A French roll has its crumb pulled out so it is all crust, then it is stuffed with thin warm roast beef, a pool of cheese melted in a bain-marie until it stretches, slices of tomato and pickled cucumber, with a pinch of oregano. It is hot, tangy, juicy and stringy. Plenty of snack bars around the country use ham instead, but beef is the classic. The thing that ruins it is cheese melted straight in a dry pan, which goes oily; melting it slowly over water with a splash of milk keeps it smooth and elastic. Chef's tip: warm the roast beef in a little of its own juices or stock, just until hot, so it stays pink and tender.

20 min

Brazilian Fast Food

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Sujuk

Late-night sandwich counters in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut's Armenian quarter, fry sujuk on a flat-top until it crackles, toss in tomatoes and wrap the lot in thin bread with toum and pickles. Ready-made sujuk is usually dried and cured; this home version is a fresh, uncured beef sausage mix seasoned with garlic, cumin, sumac and Aleppo pepper and shaped into skinless fingers, so it cooks quickly and safely. It is just as good at breakfast with fried eggs. The common mistake is frying on a high heat from the start, which burns the spices before the meat cooks through. Chef's tip: chill the shaped sausages for 30 minutes first; they hold together and brown better.

60 min

Lebanese Meat

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Zapiekanka

Zapiekanka is Polish street food born in the 1970s and perfected at the hatch windows around Plac Nowy in Kraków's Kazimierz district, where students and night owls queue for one at midnight. Half a long baguette is topped with mushrooms fried with onion, covered in grated cheese and baked until crisp at the edges and bubbling, then finished with a zigzag of ketchup and chives. The classic version has no meat at all. Use a hard cheese made with vegetarian rennet (many supermarket mild Cheddars and Goudas are). Chef's tip: fry the mushrooms until completely dry before they go on the bread; wet mushrooms make the baguette soggy instead of crisp.

20 min

Polish Fast Food

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Vinegret

Vinegret is the ruby-coloured salad that sits on almost every Ukrainian New Year and Christmas table, alongside olivier, and fills lunch boxes through the winter. Cooked beetroot, potato and carrot are diced small and tossed with sauerkraut, pickled cucumbers and beans, then dressed with fragrant unrefined sunflower oil, the kind sold by the bottle at markets in Poltava and Kherson. Despite the name there is often no vinegar at all; the sourness comes from the pickles. It is vegan, cheap and keeps for days. Chef's tip: dress the diced beetroot with oil on its own first, then mix in everything else; the oil coats it so the potatoes stay pale and the salad looks like a mosaic rather than all pink.

60 min

Ukrainian Salads

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Bauru

Sujuk

Zapiekanka

Vinegret

Goes well with pickled cucumbers