✅ Pickled orange and onion in a vinegar base, a great addition to salads!

This is a very simple and fun pickle. One of these days you will have these three ingredients sitting around and you will just need to try it. It is simply fresh oranges, red onion, and white wine vinegar. You could add garlic and, basically, anything at all to suit yourself. During the pickled, the orange loses some of its sweetness and the onion gains some. It all becomes extra wonderfully vinegary, in a good, culinary sense.

This is a simple vinegar pickle that anyone can succeed with, without any special tools or equipment. As a wild fermenter these are a great change because they move you away from the salty flavors of brine ferments. You trade the salt for vinegar, in this case a quality culinary white wine vinegar.

Vinegar pickles are far more forgiving than salt ferments. There is no salt proportion to worry about. If a vegetable floats on top for a minute or two, it’s not going to go bad on you. You ought to take all of the usual precautions as you do with a salt fermentation, but your success rate will approach 100% if you do. You also end up with a flavored vinegar as a by-product — an exceptional flavored vinegar.

In your list of “tools” is a boiled rock. This is simply a weight to keep your food underneath the vinegar. Without it, your orange and onion slices will float and risk spoilage. Unlike salt brine solutions, your vinegar-based ferments are far less likely to spoil, but a weight is basically a guarantee against it.

(The photo here does not include the weight and you can see that the whole business just want to float to the top of the vinegar level. Your weight takes care of that problem.)

Pickled Orange and Onion Ingredients

• 1-2 oranges, peeled, seeded, and sliced
• 1/2 red onion, thin sliced
• 1 cup apple cider or white wine vinegar

Tools

• Quart-sized mason jar
• 1 boiled rock to use as a weight (that will fit into the mason jar mouth opening)

Pickled Orange and Onion Steps

1. Peel, slice, and seed your oranges.
2. Thin-slice your onion
3. Layer the orange and onion in your mason jar, leaving about two inches of room at the top of the jar.
4. Cover with white wine vinegar.
5. Depending on the amount of orange and onion, you will use more or less of the vinegar.
6. Place your clean and boiled rock on top of the orange and onion to ensure that it stays below the vinegar. (If some pieces creep up, I wouldn’t actually worry about it. Vinegar is very forgiving.)