A while ago I wrote a post about making dill pickles. Look
here to find it. When the pickles had pickled long enough, I tasted them and they were delicious. But oh my, they were so sour. Well, I said...there's a lot of vinegar in here. What does my mother's recipe say? My mother, of course, made The World's Best Dill Pickles.
Mom's recipe said 2 cups vinegar to 10 cups water, while the one I used said 3 cups vinegar to 3 cups water. What the heck? No wonder they were sour. When I went to make the next batch, thanks to three very prolific cucumber plants, the ratio of vinegar to water was a lot more like my mom's. Then Wayne got on the computer to check out why there would be such a discrepancy in recipes. Hmmm.
I looked at the old Bell Canning Jar recipe book for pickles that I got from my mom's stuff when she died. Same thing. One recipe said 1 for 1, vinegar to water. The next said lots less vinegar to lots more water. Eventually Wayne and I came up with the same answer.
If you're doing the whole canning thing, processing the filled jars in boiling water and all that, and expecting to keep the pickles for years on a shelf in the basement, the 2 cups vinegar to 10 cups water thing works fine. Well, no pickle lasts more than a couple of months in this house so why bother with that?
If you're doing a simple pickle, where you pour boiling pickling brine over the cucumbers and just seal them up to do their thing but plan to eat them within six months or so, they'll start growing all kinds of bacteria unless you put enough vinegar into them to make that impossible. So there we were, with some mighty sour pickles. And one batch that was going to grow bacteria.
We found a solution, of course. First, we re-did the second batch with more vinegar. Then we took a jar that was ready to eat (it had pickled for at least 2 weeks) and we poured the pickling brine out but left the pickles and the goodies like garlic and dill in. Then we made a new brine with just water, salt, and a bit of sugar. We brought it to a boil and we poured it over the sour pickles. It went into the fridge for a couple of days so some of the vinegar could leach out of the pickles. Eureka! We hit it perfectly and the pickles were finally to die for.
Now when we need more pickles, we take them from their original brine and put them in the jar with the less-vinegary brine. They only take a day or two to calm down. I imagine after a few rounds of this, the brine in the new jar will get vinegary from all the leaching-out, and we'll have to make a new mild brine to use. Meanwhile we are enjoying those dill pickles.
P.S. Did you know dill pickles are delicious instead of the traditional celery stalk in a
Bloody Mary? Yum.
