How to Make Your Own Pickled Grapes

Pickled grapes make for a great topping for a salad and are also excellent as appetizers, served with crackers, cheese and other hour de ours . They have a tangy, slightly bitter tase, thanks to the vinegar, so they pair nicely with something sweet or bland, like most cheeses and crackers. They will add some bite and flavor to your salad or any dish you want to use them as a garnish or topping with.

A lot of people have had pickled cucumbers, which are simply pickles, as we know them. Pickled beets are pretty common as well, but pickled green grapes and other kinds of pickled grapes are not so common. It is likely that you have never had this food before, and I think you are probably missing out. I love having these as a snack, paired with some complementary food.

Before you start making this pickled grapes recipe, I’m going to suggest that you get a paring knife for easy grape slicing and a quart jar for easy canning and storage. Pickled foods store very well and last a long time, but they need to be stored properly. Just placing them into an airtight container isn’t enough, so make sure you have the right stuff on hand to pickle and store the grapes properly.

Pickled grapes canning is a hobby unto itself, and many people spend a lot of time getting the perfect grapes for canning and long-term storage. Trying to find the most desirable type of grape and the right flavor for their pickled grapes recipes, some pickled grapes enthusiasts will be very specific with the canning supplies they use and the type of grapes they can with.

Recipe for Pickled Grapes

I’m going to give you a recipe that is similar to a lot of pickled grapes recipes, but you may find some slight differences.

Everybody has their preferred seasonings and spices and their method of preservation. I would not suggest mixing and matching recipes to make your own connection until you are comfortable with a single recipe first.

Mixing up different ingredients and methods can be tricky, and it could result in catastrophe if you don’t know what you are doing.

So, I would suggest becoming familiarized with the pickling and canning process first before you get involved in trying to modify an existing recipe and making up your own one.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound of red grapes
• ¼ cup of water
• 1 cup of apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup of white sugar
• ½ vanilla bean
• 1 cinnamon stick
• ¼ teaspoon of cloves
• 1/8 teaspoon of yellow mustard seeds
• ¼ teaspoon of black peppercorns

Directions:

1. Wash your grapes and take the stems off. The stem end should be sliced off and set to the side.
2. Combine water, vinegar, and sugar in a saucepan. Heat on high and boil. Once your mixture starts to boil, turn off the heat.
3. Open a quart jar and place your spices in the bottom of it- cloves, peppercorn, mustard seeds, cinnamon and vanilla bean.
4. Take your trimmed grapes and place them into the jar on top of your spices.
5. Take your hot vinegar mixture and pour it over the grapes.
6. Allow the grapes to cool, and once they are cool, you can cover the jar with a lid and refrigerate.
7. Before you serve the pickled red grapes, allow them to rest in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours, letting them get properly pickled in the process.

Can You Use the Same Recipe for Pickled Green Grapes?

I talked earlier about not switching around recipes to make a personalized recipe. Part of the reason for that is because you would get very different results even by changing up a single ingredient, in many cases.

It is safer to just follow an established recipe. If you use green grapes instead of red grapes for the pickled grapes recipe, you will get a different flavor, so you would want to use different seasonings.

You can use rosemary and chile with green grapes, or if you want to keep the flavor and recipe similar to the one up above, you can leave out the cloves, vanilla bean, peppercorns, and mustard seeds and use some salt and white grape juice instead.

This makes a sweeter pickled grape than the recipe we used for red grapes up above, and that takes advantage of the naturally sweet characteristics of the green grapes.

How to Make Spicy Pickled Grapes

Would you like your pickled grapes to have a little kick to them? You can make spicy pickled grapes using a different recipe and create an entirely different kind of pickled treat. For those who love spicy foods, this is an easy recipe that is a superb snack for anytime.

I’m going to share a slightly different recipe with you that really brings out the spiciness and takes full advantage of the hot kick that we are trying to go for with these grapes.

You could just add some red pepper flakes to the recipe above and see how that works for you, only adding as much as you want to make the grapes as spicy as you like, but that would be doing you a disservice, I think.

Why not give you a whole new recipe to play with? So, here it is.

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups of red grapes
• 1 cups of sugar
• ½ cups of apple cider vinegar
• 1 ½ teaspoons of sea salt
• 1 tablespoon of black peppercorns
• 1 tablespoon of yellow mustard seed
• 15 whole cloves
• 1 teaspoon of coriander seed
• 1 teaspoon of red pepper flakes (add more if you like it spicier)
• 4 sticks of cinnamon
• 6 bay leaves

Directions:

1. We are just making this according to the same direction as above, so start by washing the grapes and slicing off the stems on the end.
2. Then, mix together the sugar, water, and vinegar in a saucepan and heat on high. Keep heating until it boils then remove from the heat.
3. Put your spices into a quart jar. The spices for this recipe would be peppercorns, cloves, bay leaf, cinnamon, mustard seeds, sea salt, coriander seed, and red pepper flakes.
4. Place the trim grapes into the jar over the spices.
5. Cover the grapes and spices with the hot vinegar mixture.
6. Let that cool and then close the jar tightly and store it in the refrigerator.
7. For best results, you should refrigerate the pickled grapes for up to 24 hours before using them.