Easy Homemade Quick-Pickled Jalapeños

This quick-pickled jalapeños recipe is ready in 5 minutes! The homemade pickle jalapeño brine uses 4 simple ingredients: equal parts water and vinegar, plus a little salt and sugar. You’ll find these sliced jalapeños to be the perfect crunchy, tangy topping for everything from pizza to tacos. Once prepared, store in the fridge for best results.

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was on a Detroit-style pizza kick. I’m still on that kick, and I’ve just shared that recipe, but first: pickled jalapeños.

One of my favorite pizzas from Emmy Squared, a Brooklyn-based Detroit-style pizza restaurant, is The Colony, a red sauce pie topped with pepperoni, pickled jalapeños, and honey. It hits all the sweet-spicy-savory notes, and the combination, as you might imagine, is heavenly.

I’ve been making this pizza at home using pickled jalapeños from the grocery store, which work just fine, but when two jalapeños arrived in our farm share last week, I knew their fate.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I use one and only one pickle recipe, originating from David Lebovitz. It’s the recipe I use in this simple pickled crudité, and I’ve simplified it over the years in that I now never bother adding garlic or peppercorns or any additional seasonings, but the 4-ingredient base brine is still the same: equal parts water and vinegar plus a little salt and sugar.

It takes no time to make: heat the brine until the sugar and salt dissolve; then pour it over the vegetables. That’s it. It doubles, triples, and halves well, so you can adjust the recipe easily to whatever amount of vegetables you have on hand — often I make 4 or 6 times the recipe depending on the amount of vegetables I plan on pickling.

How to Use Pickled Jalapeños

In two words: on everything! Pickles are so nice to have on hand — what sandwich isn’t instantly transformed with the addition of a briney bite? What taco doesn’t shine a little brighter when peppered with tangy spheres?

No sandwich. No taco. I hope these pickled jalapeños find their way into your condiment collection soon. Your sandwiches and tacos (and pizza!) will thank you. Here are a few ideas:

• Detroit-Syle Pizza
• Simple Weeknight Tacos
• Chicken Tinga Tacos
• Chickpea Taco Bowls
• Sweet Potato & Black Bean Burritos
• Vegetarian Bean and Cheese Enchiladas

Other Vegetables to Quick Pickle

ALL the vegetables. Over the years I’ve used this brine to pickle beets, turnips, carrots, radishes, peppers, onions, fennel, kohlrabi, cauliflower … everything.

If you subscribe to a weekly farm share, I find pickling to be as helpful a technique to turn to when I am overloaded with certain vegetables (radishes! turnips!) as when I am underloaded with vegetables (a single fennel bulb, for example, or two small peppers).

How to Make Pickled Jalapeños, Step by Step

Slice up 3 to 4 jalapeños (or as many as you wish). There is no need to remove the seeds! Simply slice straight down to create spheres.

Transfer them to a glass jar. Then combine: 1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1 teaspoon sugar, and 1 teaspoon salt in a small saucepan, and bring it to a simmer.

Pour the hot brine over the sliced jalapeños. Let the peppers cool completely in the brine.

Store in the fridge for months.

Sprinkle the pickled jalapeños over tacos or bake them atop pizza:

Print