Pan Yan Pickle recipe
Jan 05, 2010
*PLEASE NOTE - this is a very old blog post - WE NO LONGER SELL PAN YAN PICKLE - Thank you :D *
Happy New Year, at present it's a very pretty one although I would like the snow to go fairly soon.
I was contacted by quite a few people last year when a jar of pan yan pickle was shown in the background during Kirsties Homemade Christmas. I was initiated into the story of the lost recipe and the 'to date' failure of Premier Foods to reproduce the product once so familiar to so many. I promised to investigate and eventually blog.
The jar behind me was made by Rose who sells in the local market. She says her recipe is one passed down to her from her mother, its main constituents are: spiced vinegar, apples, sugar and saltanas. I searched online and discovered there are variations on this recipe type using curry powder etc
The original recipe taken from ageneric jar of Pan Yan Pickle shown 19.03.08 on mailonline. is as follows
Rutabagar (swede), sugar, apples, carrots, vinegar, thickener (modified starch) gerkins, acetic acid, peppers, onions, spices, colour (caramel), flavourings.
As I am told the pickle was a fine dice one, I suspect the swede/carrots etc were bought in pre-diced to provide the texture, there would be a background of apple (hence its preponderance in the other recipes ) within an spiced emulsion/sauce. The recipe would be fairly easy to unpick if I had tasted it.
I like a challenge and if you can tell me your memories of its flavour as precisely as possible I would be happy to have a go at reconstituting it. This comes with the caviat that I don't buy in pre-prepared vegetables so the texture won't be accurate.
Once I have sufficient feedback to try and work out the 'spices' and 'flavourings' I will make a batch and put it on the website so it can be sampled. If it manages to replicate the pickle then I will put the recipe in the book and/or offer it to Premier Foods as it is essentially a pickle for mass production.
If this is too much bother you may like to try Fortnum's pickle (I was given a jar at Christmas......you have to check out the opposition) Ingredients (not in full): sugar, vinegar, swede, parsnip, carrot, turnip, apple etc a similar texture (pre prep veg etc) to that described.
I'll be fascinated to see what the response is.........over to you, this is definitely something I can't do alone!
******************** *UPDATE* May 2013 ..... http://cranfieldsfoods.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/panyan-pickle-reconstructed/ Better late than never! ********************
61 comments
AAH! I live in Guyana now, and when in UK last year searched the shelves for Pan Yan. Now I know why it wasn’t there. PLEASE Find an answer to the recipe.
I’m a 62 yr old youngster from Glasgow. We used to put Pan Yan on our Sunday Fry Up and a bit of beetroot mmmm loved it, BRING IT BACK
Lorna is absolutely right – its was not really dark in colour. Machonachies were a London firm and sold out to Sunpat years ago. THEN it became a dark brown like every other pickle but it tasted about the same. Originally it was really very green, almost as if it had been made with green tomatoes but I don’t think that was it. I suspect (and I am a chef by profession) that the green was perhaps turmeric and ginger. Turmeric when boiled at high temperature, colours excessively and also adds a somewhat sharp taste to a dish. That was the secret of Panyan – that vinegary sharpness. Now, this might be pie in the sky but when Panyan was made by Premier at Bury St Edmunds, it was just up the road to the sugar beet factory. I’ve never tasted sugar beet (in Suffolk I believe they use the left over product after extraction to feed cattle) but it does look like a big swede. I know Rutabagar is Swede because the yanks always call it that, but do you think sugar beet, being so prolific in the area, could have been used. Has it ever been used in pickle before? We still see piles of it when harvested all around bury st edmunds so it might be.
Panyan had very small veg (I might try a brief chop in my food processor and have a go) it had little bits of red in it (could have been pimento and pepper), obviously onions and apples and (even though they also made a named “Curry” pickle) I suspect from the taste there may even have been a SMALL amount of curry powder in with the spices in the original pickle. For acetic acid would that have been used as a balancer and what would I use for this if I were trying it out, or would white vinegar work alone? When you looked at the pickle it was not sticky looking like Branston. The sauce around it looked opaque (like a picallili) but it was still shiny, the sauce really binding it all very nicely. There was a different shade of green with the little bits of pepper which I assume was gherkin (very small) and perhaps there was no green pepper but just red. It was not sweet, more like sweet and sour I would say. I’m going to have a bash and I’ll send a jar to anyone who wants to try. I will post again when I’ve made some!
Keep your fingers crossed. The whole family keep asking me to make it, so I guess I’ll have a go.
Elaine