Home Pickling

The day before yesterday, I made my first batch of pickles. I thought I’d chronicle the ups and downs of pickle production, complete with my mistakes for your learning.

I’ve never canned anything before, so I relied heavily on advice from a friend, but some of the items were not easily available, like the wide mouth Ball canning jars. The quart sized jars I got had the regular sized openings. This proved to be a problem, necessitating cutting the cucumbers into slices, spears, and chunks to pack them into the jars.

The adventure began at our local farmer’s market where I purchased 60 Kirby cucumbers, a nice, crisp pickling variety. The farmer’s market had no dill (Even though my plant had 25 flower heads on it, it had very few of the fern-like leaves, so I wanted extra dill.) The cukes cost about $20. Off to Wal Mart.

Wal-Mart, I was told, was the best place to find all of the pickling supplies. Not true. The problem was that none of their workers (we actually only found 2 workers on the sales floor) knew where the jars and accessories might be. After wandering around the super center store for what seemed like hours looking for canning supplies, we finally found them in the “home” department.

They were out of wide mouthed jars, so I got the regular jars. They had very few pickling or canning supplies. So much for the “super center.” Next time I’ll shop around to get the wide mouthed jars so I don’t have to cut up all the pickles. I also found the canning salt there (this is similar to kosher salt – it has no iodine or free flowing chemical agents in it) as well as a little kit for filling the jars and processing which included a gizmo that lifts the filled, hot jars out of the boiling water bath, another gizmo that has a magnet on one end for lifting the jar lids out of the hot water, a funnel that fit snugly into the non-wide mouth jars, and another plastic thing that I was probably supposed to use to measure 1″ from the top of the jars. I thought I had everything I needed.

When we got home, I ran a clear wash through my washing machine with a couple of cups of vinegar in it to help get all the fabric softener residue out of the machine.  Then I put in the pickles along with a few towels, set the washer on the delicate cycle for 4 minutes. It did a beautiful job of cleaning the cucumbers really well. The hardest part was getting 60 pickles out of the washer, untangling them from the towels, and only being able to grab 2 at a time. I thought my back would break.

I had read an article on Clemson University’s site that said you can eliminate the alum (which I forgot to buy anyway, and later found out contains aluminum, which is toxic) if you cut the blossom end off the pickles then soak them in ice water for 4 hours. Alum is mainly for crispness, and the trimming and ice soak are supposed to help keep the pickles crisp. I got out the cooler, put a double layer of trash bags in it, dumped in the trimmed pickles and ice water and let them soak while I sanitized the jars in the dishwasher.

This may have been a mistake because when I packed the cukes into the jar, they were quite cold. This lowered the temperature of the water bath, perhaps too much. Clemson’s site also said to keep the garlic from turning green, try to use water with no minerals in it like distilled or reverse osmosis water. I used RO water; the garlic turned bright green almost immediately. Bob said if green garlic bothers me, then I shouldn’t look at it. Good advice. So much for Clemson’s integrity, at least on this subject.

I got a friend to help me pack the jars. Into each jar went 2 heads of dill and 2 smashed cloves of peeled garlic. I also tucked a cayenne pepper into 2 of the jars. It was impossible to put whole pickles into the jars because of the small mouths, so we started with spears, then advanced to long thick slices for sandwiches and finished with chunks to fill in the gaps. We shoved as many pickles as we could into the jars. Then I made the brine.

I didn’t know how much brine to make so I started out with 3 quarts of vinegar, 6 quarts of water, and 2  1/4 cups of salt.  This proved to be more than enough for 12 quart sized jars. I brought the brine to a boil, then started pouring it into the jars. As each jar was filled, I put the lid and ring on.

When all 12 were filled, I brought the processing pot with about 4″ of water in it to a boil – this took forever; we have a really crummy stove. By the time the water bath got hot, the pickles were not. Oh well. I stuck them in the pot with the lid on and processed them for about 10 minutes. The water never did boil. I wondered if I was going to kill whoever ate these pickles because the water never boiled.

Then I figured that the brine had enough vinegar and salt in it to keep bacteria from growing; that they’d probably be ok. I hope so, anyway. (The next time I do this, I’ll have the processing water already hot while I’m filling the jars, and will only process 2 or 3 jars at a time.) Bob said the water should be boiling the entire time the jars are processing. Oh well.

After processing, my brother said to remove the rings, dry off the top, and use the Food Saver jar sucker to vacuum seal them. That was the most frustrating experience of all. The sucker wouldn’t shut off readily with the “stop” button, so I kept sucking juice up into the Food Saver.

Even though the liquid was a good inch below the top of the jar, I kept sucking liquid into the machine. When this happened, I’d disconnect the tube, blow out all the brine, wipe out the Food Saver and try again. Two of the jars never did seal; I don’t know why. Those 2 jars I put in the fridge and by morning they had sealed themselves (at least the little dimples were down).

I had a few remaining cukes that I’d already cut up, and had brine left over, so I combined the two, brought them to a boil and shut them off. When they were cool, I removed the cukes from the brine because they tasted too salty to me, and put them in the fridge. In the morning I added water and vinegar in a 2:1 ratio to them. We ate them for lunch and they were really great. So that’s how you can make instant pickles.

The remaining jars should be ready to eat in a few weeks. What an adventure! This was a LOT of work, but it was fun; I’ll probably do it again….some day.

Happy gardening!