Sun-dried Green Mango Pickle

In our backyard grows a big mango tree, which bears fruits every couple of years. As we are competing with a gang of  notorious monkeys I’ve never gotten any of its ripe fruits, but you can trick them and pluck your share while they are still young and sour. Mangoes in India (similar to jackfruits) are used in various stages of ripening and can be used in savory dishes or enjoyed as a sweet fruit. There are many uses for unripe mangoes – they get dried and grind to a powder (amchur powder), turned into a tangy summer drink (aam panna), sprinkled with chili salt  as a snack or sun-dried and preserved in oil and spices.

I guess most of my readers don’t have a mango tree in their backyard and won’t need a recipe for pickled green mangoes and even in India, where mangoes are abundant, nowadays less people preserve mangoes themselves as a huge variety of commercial pickles and chutneys are available. I was also not particularly interested in cutting and drying kilos of mangoes and if it weren’t for our gardener I would have never attempted this project. He basically forced me into it with first dropping off sacks full of green mangoes at our house, than bringing his wife Devi to show me how to do it and finally uncovering a glass full of preserved mangoes from last years harvest. After trying a spoonful of the pickle my husband and me were very impressed – the mangoes were still a bit acidic but tasted incredible savory with a pleasant meaty texture. It seemed magical how the sour fruits had turned into these little umami flavor bombs and I was now very willing to spend my entire weekend with cutting and drying of mangoes.

My husband remembered that his grandmother used to preserve mangoes that way, but in the generation of his parents already many traditional recipes were not used anymore. Since his childhood he hadn’t eaten anything comparable and got really excited about the flavor of the homemade pickle. The preserved mangoes made me wonder one more time how many recipes and how much flavor already got lost through the industrialization of our food ?

The family of our gardener still makes their own pickles as they are poor and preserving mangoes means a cheap way to enhance their diet and stock up their supplies. A few pieces of preserved mangoes, with rotis (flatbread) and sliced onions can be a simple but satisfying meal.

If you don’t have a mango tree in your backyard you’ll maybe still be thinking that the recipe is pretty useless to you, but you can also preserve other vegetables in a similar way and I’ll update about that later. Till then I hope I maybe could inspire someone to see what’s ripe wherever you live and ask some grandmother for a recipe for how to preserve it.