The first pickles

Now I know for sure it's summer - I just canned my first two quarts of dill pickles! Aren't they gorgeous?

We have six cucumber plants in pots on the ledge on the front porch, so their vines can hang off the front of the house. They are starting to produce, and I think they're going to be prolific! Yay! More pickles.

My mom made the world's best dill pickles, as I've mentioned on this blog before. She, however, did a proper job of canning and preserving. We go though pickles too fast for that at our house - nothing needs to be preserved for months because it will be eaten long before that. So here's how I do the pickling.

• Sterilize your jars and lids in boiling water for 10 minutes. Then let them sit in the hot water while you prepare the brine.
• In a saucepan, bring a brine to a boil. For two quarts of pickles, I used 2 cups water, 1 cup apple cider vinegar, 3/4 cup white vinegar, 1/4 cup good pure sea salt, and 2 tablespoons of sugar. That's a lot of vinegar, but that's what keeps bacteria from getting in your pickles, just in case you don't eat them right away.
• Take the jars out of the hot water and empty them. Stuff them with cucumbers (cut the flower end off and wash them first), heads of fresh dill, peeled garlic cloves, and a few peppercorns. I've also used dried little hot peppers. Leave an inch or so at the top.
• Ladle or pour the hot brine over the pickles and seasonings in jar. Leave 1/4 inch head room at the top. Seal tightly with your sterilized lids.

Let sit in a cool dark place (I put them in a cabinet in the basement) for two weeks before eating. After you open them, store them in the fridge. If they are too sour for your taste, drain the brine out of the jar you're using (after the two weeks of course) and fill it with water with a bit of sugar dissolved in it. Let it sit in the fridge for a few days and enough of the vinegar will leach out into the water to make them just right! Yum!

I've got my mom's old Ball Jar canning book, which would have been from the 1950s. There are a lot of cool recipes for various pickles and preserves in it, but even better is the "recipe" that's printed on the inside back cover. Here it is:

How to Preserve a Husband

 

Be careful in your selection. Do not choose too young. When selected, give your entire thoughts to preparation for domestic use. Some wives insist upon keeping them in a pickle, others are constantly getting them into hot water. This may make them sour, hard, and sometimes bitter; even poor varieties may be made sweet, tender and good, by garnishing them with patience, well sweetened with love and seasoned with kisses. Wrap them in a mantle of charity. Keep warm with a steady fire of domestic devotion and serve with peaches and cream. Thus prepared, they will keep for years.

 

Food for thought . . .how cute is that???



Some things I've learned about pickling

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.