It's a pretty simple recipe. For the brine, the ratios are:
2 cups water
2 cups white vinegar (5% acidity)
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup salt
Depending on how you slice the cucumbers and how tightly you pack the jars, a quart jar uses about 1.5 to 2 cups of this brine, so you can scale the amount you make by how many jars you have. Usually, I'll pack the first jar with the cucumbers, then fill it with water, and pour the water out into a measuring cup to get an estimate of how much brine each jar will take, then use that to calculate how much brine to cook up. My canner holds 7 quarts at a time, so that's generally the size of the batch I will make. That usually takes a triple batch of the above ingredients (12 cups liquid in total). 7 quarts is about 10 lbs of cucumbers or so, if sliced lengthwise into spears.
The process is easy: mix all the brine ingredients together (you can omit the sugar if you're doing low-carb, but it does help balance the sourness a bit. Don't worry, the pickles are still quite sour!) in a pot and bring to a boil.
I always use quart jars with these pickles. Put a sprig of fresh dill and two cloves of garlic in each jar. You can double these amounts if you want more dill flavor or a bigger garlic hit. Pack the jars with your cucumbers (either whole or sliced into halves, spears, or chips). No matter how you slice them, the pickles will stay crunchier if you cut off about 1/2" from each end of the cucumber and discard it. Add 1/4 teaspoon of Ball "Pickle Crisp" (calcium chloride salt) to each jar. This makes the pickles much crunchier and eliminates the need for the old-school method of soaking them in lime or a salt bath to draw out some of the moisture.
Then pour the hot brine over the cucumbers, filling the jar to within 1/2" of the top. Put on the lids and rings, and process for 15 minutes in a boiling water canner. You can omit the canning process and just let the pickles cool overnight before refrigerating them, if you are just making a small batch to be kept in the fridge. In that case, you can probably omit the Pickle Crisp, too, since you're not going to be cooking them in the canning bath, they will naturally stay crisper.
Either way, don't eat them for at least two weeks, to let the flavors do their magic and fully work into the pickles.
Squeaky Frog
npub1wsx…6gk5
2024-06-02 09:59:33
in reply to nevent1q…48ns
Author Public Key
npub1wsxc86a5lhe4zxkddhfjjrff7em900uez4h9lcr6vl3uh3ehtwlqca6gk5Published at
2024-06-02 09:59:33Event JSON
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"content": "It's a pretty simple recipe. For the brine, the ratios are:\n\n2 cups water\n2 cups white vinegar (5% acidity)\n1/4 cup sugar\n1/4 cup salt\n\nDepending on how you slice the cucumbers and how tightly you pack the jars, a quart jar uses about 1.5 to 2 cups of this brine, so you can scale the amount you make by how many jars you have. Usually, I'll pack the first jar with the cucumbers, then fill it with water, and pour the water out into a measuring cup to get an estimate of how much brine each jar will take, then use that to calculate how much brine to cook up. My canner holds 7 quarts at a time, so that's generally the size of the batch I will make. That usually takes a triple batch of the above ingredients (12 cups liquid in total). 7 quarts is about 10 lbs of cucumbers or so, if sliced lengthwise into spears. \n\nThe process is easy: mix all the brine ingredients together (you can omit the sugar if you're doing low-carb, but it does help balance the sourness a bit. Don't worry, the pickles are still quite sour!) in a pot and bring to a boil.\n\nI always use quart jars with these pickles. Put a sprig of fresh dill and two cloves of garlic in each jar. You can double these amounts if you want more dill flavor or a bigger garlic hit. Pack the jars with your cucumbers (either whole or sliced into halves, spears, or chips). No matter how you slice them, the pickles will stay crunchier if you cut off about 1/2\" from each end of the cucumber and discard it. Add 1/4 teaspoon of Ball \"Pickle Crisp\" (calcium chloride salt) to each jar. This makes the pickles much crunchier and eliminates the need for the old-school method of soaking them in lime or a salt bath to draw out some of the moisture.\n\nThen pour the hot brine over the cucumbers, filling the jar to within 1/2\" of the top. Put on the lids and rings, and process for 15 minutes in a boiling water canner. You can omit the canning process and just let the pickles cool overnight before refrigerating them, if you are just making a small batch to be kept in the fridge. In that case, you can probably omit the Pickle Crisp, too, since you're not going to be cooking them in the canning bath, they will naturally stay crisper.\n\nEither way, don't eat them for at least two weeks, to let the flavors do their magic and fully work into the pickles.\n",
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