"Wasabi" Pickled Carrots

We are expecting guests on Sunday, and I decided to make pickled carrots in advance, using this recipe as a rough guideline.

I had 500 g of multicolored carrots:

I peeled and trimmed them.

 On the right in the photo above, you can see my favorite vegetable peeler. You might guess from its shape that it is intended for peeling asparagus. I like it because it is sharp and because it peels rather thickly.

So I used it to peel the carrots into strips.

Meanwhile, Ben had peeled the ginger and chopped it with the draw-knife.

This resulted in a lot more than one and a half teaspoons of finely chopped ginger. More like one and a half tablespoons. But when I used the amount stated in the recipe, the carrots didn't taste of ginger at all.

I added that to the carrots and this much chili flakes:

The container on the left is in fact a mill, to grind the flakes more finely.

I also added a scant tablespoon of regular household salt (not kosher salt). I used plain salt, not the salt with iodine and fluorides added. On top of that came four generous teaspoons of sugar and four scant teaspoons of this prepared horseradish:

I really wonder if the author of the original recipe was thinking of something like this when she advertised "prepared horseradish". She speaks of a "bottle" of the stuff - the concoction from Bavaria in the picture above is much too thick to put it into a bottle. It also contains sulfates, and I don't think that makes it better than the "wasabi" preparations readily available in Swiss supermarkets. One day, I think I'll use "the green gunk in the tube" and see what happens.

I used a pair of salad servers to work the seasonings into the carrots.

Then I stuffed everything into my pickle press.

While I was typing this report, it has sat in the fridge for - well, maybe a bit more than half an hour. I just took it out and transferred the carrots to a different container, setting some aside to try them.

They turned out really well!