Pickled Papaya

After helping out in our community garden, I was automatically accepted as one of the members of this group of gardeners :p and whatever fruits they harvested from their own garden, I too get a share of the fruits LOL! So super happy and feeling blessed when I was given two organic green papaya with one showing slight yellowish on the surface. I decided to pickle one and leave the other one to ripen on its own before eating it . I googled on how to make pickled papaya and thus found one from Wendy's blog. Thanks Wendy for the recipe.  It turned out great...I manually slice them all as thin as I can go.  Crunchy and it tasted so good that WB walloped almost all of it :)

Pickled Papaya  - adapted from Table for 2

ingredients:

1 kg firm papaya ( clean weight w/o skin and seeds )
2 tbsp of salt
300 gm rice vinegar
300gm sugar
10 bird's eye chillies

Method:

1. Boil rice vinegar and sugar, stir so that sugar will not set to bottom. Let it cool down completely before use.

2. Peel papaya. Half the fruit, remove seeds and rinse the fruit.

3. Cut into small pieces and slice with a mandolin.

4. Put salt over sliced papaya and rub salt all over papaya slices.  Make sure the slices do not stick together and are properly rubbed with salt.

5. Leave salted papaya for 5 mins ( not too long ) the papaya is ready to be rinsed when it looks pliable.

6. Rinse slated papaya twice. Shake off excess water.  No need to squeeze.

7. Put papaya slices into a non reactive vessel ( glass, stainless steel, ceramic )

8. Snip bird's eye chillies and pour cooled vinegar syrup over.

9. With a clean dry chopstick, stir papaya slices to make sure the papaya is submerged and coated with the vinegar syrup.

10. Let the papaya sit for a few hours.  Adjust taste.

11. Let papaya pickle for at least 2 days in the fridge before serving.

Enjoy !