The Art of Making Dill Pickles

I thought I should do a more in depth post about how I make pickles.  Basically I just follow the recipie in the Ball Book of Home Preserving.  Here is some step by step info on what I do.

First off I always try to use the very freshest cucumbers that I can find.  If the skins are starting to pucker I won't use them for anything but eating fresh.  I try to keep up with the cucumber harvest by eating the oldest in cucumber and tomato salads, but some weeks it is very easy to get behind. 

This is the cucumber harvest from the last two days.  It's not huge or anything, but canning in small batches is less overwhelming to me.

 

I scrubbed them well and cut a thin slice from the blossom end.  Leaving that on can make the pickles bitter.  I then layered the cucumbers in a ceramic dish.

 

 

The next step involves mixing a 1/2 cup of pickling salt with 4 cups of water. 

 

 

Stir until the water is clear again.

 

Then cover the cucumbers with the salt water.

 

Depending on the size of the dish, you may need to add more water to cover them completely.

 

In the book it says to layer cucumber and ice cubes, but I just cover the mix with ice and keep it in the fridge to soak for about 12 hours.  I figure that the ice is just meant to keep the temperatures of the cucumbers as cold as possible without freezing them.  I don't want to use too much ice because it obviously dilutes the salt water as it melts which would affect the taste of the finished product.

 

 

As the 12 hours mark approaches I prepare the canner with jars and lids.  I fill the large pot until water covers the jars and heat on high until it boils.  After the water is boiling I add fresh lids to the water and let it go for at least ten minutes to sterilize the jars and lids.

 

While the canner is heating I heat up the pickling brine in a seperate pot.  I make my brine in large batches and keep it in the fridge to use as needed.  Every time I need some brine for pickles I just take a couple jars out of the fridge and throw them into a pot and bring it to a boil.

 

While the brine is heating I will skin a few cloves of garlic and pick fresh dill flower heads to be added to the jars for flavor.

The book also calls for adding a few teaspoons of mustard seed to the jars but I have been unable to find any this year.

 

The last thing I do before I pack the cucumbers into the jars is to rinse them very well under cold water.  This gets rid of any excess salt in the final product.

 

Each jar gets one clove of homegrown garlic, one head of fresh dill and as many pickles as I can squeeze into it.  Right now I am only using pint jars because my harvests are still fairly small.  If I start getting cucumbers in large numbers I will use quart jars instead.  After packing each hot jar I top them off with boiling hot pickline brine.  When all the jars have been filled, wiped and capped they go back into the canner for twenty minutes.  At the altitude I live at they need to process for an extra ten minutes to ensure they are safe.

 

This small batch only made three pints, but in my book three is much better than none.  I look forward to munching on delicious dill pickles all winter long.