The great pickle experiment....

I love sour pickles.
You know the ones in the big jars at the Deli?  The ones that make your mouth pucker when you bite into them.  I can remember crunching down on sour pickles at the Bel-Air drive-in theater while watching things like 'Salt and Pepper', 'Cold Turkey', and 'The Ghost and Mr. Chicken'.
I like my pickles REALLY sour.
Come to find out, the ones I like are full sours and they are fermented.
And, strictly speaking, do not have vinegar in them.
Well, I like a good vinegar pickle.  Sour, with vinegar, that's what I'm after.
We had a lot of cucumbers to use.

 So, Tuesday I took a run at sour dill pickles.
This is an experimental batch.  So I'm not doing the full-on canning thing.
and this batch isn't going to be the best.
It's been a kinda rough year for the cucumbers.  But they are a hardy lot and have produced well.  We've been playing hide and seek with the cucumber vines and a few of them were out there longer than they should have been.

I ended up peeling a couple of the cukes, cuz the skins were too tough and blemished.
Add to that a lack of appropriate spices and this batch has some problems off the top.

But, I've never done this before and it needed to be done quickly.  We're gonna have to make a trip to Olde Town Spice to get the good spices.

For now, I'm working with what I have.  Which is a jar of pickling spice, which I'm not thrilled with.  I don't like allspice that much, and the commercial mix is loaded with allspice.   But, I gave it a try, it was all I could get at the store that day.  I had ground mustard and coriander, so I went ahead and used it. 

So, with those considerations, this won't be the best batch.  But, I processed the cucumbers before they went bad, and I'll have an idea of what I really want when we get organized for a trip out to St, Charles.

I'm already thinking about what I want in MY pickling spice.





So, Tuesday night I washed, peeled, and cut 4 large pickles.

I decided to try spears and thick slices.  Just for the sake of the experiment.
4 large cucumbers packed 3 quart jars.

I used:

3 cups white vinegar
3 cups water
1/3 cup sea salt

for the brine, and it was salty and vinegary enough for me.

While that was boiling I added spices to the jars.

The jar of spears got a clove of garlic and 1 Tablespoon of dill seed.

The jar of slices got a clove of garlic, 1 Tablespoon of dill seed, and 1 teaspoon of pickling spice.  Who knows, I might be wrong about the allspice.  It's worth a try.

The jar that's mostly slices, that got the last 2 spears chunked up, cuz I couldn't fit them in the spear jar, got 1 clove of garlic, 1 Tablespoon of dill seed, 1 teaspoon of celery seed, 1 teaspoon of ground mustard, 1 teaspoon of ground coriander.

And the list for the spice shop got a whole lot of things added to it.

I poured boiling brine into the jars, weighted them down with cups of water, threw a towel over them, and left the sitting on the counter.

As I write, the jars are still on the kitchen counter, souring.  I tried one yesterday and decided to let it go another day.

We'll have to wait and see what happens....