To me, July means the opening of pickle making season. The Valley has many farms that produce abundant first-rate pickling cucumbers. My garden produces plenty of dill and garlic. (Hopefully this year, I will have some of my own home grown cukes as well.) Pickles are the natural result of all of these riches.
I have been making a variations on a basic dill cucumber pickle recipe for many years. It all started when we had to go gluten-free in our kitchen. We missed good vinegary pickles, so I resolved to make them myself. Like so many people, I thought this was going to be a hard thing to do. I soon learned that with quality ingredients, it’s pretty easy to make good pickles. You also don’t have to make 3 dozen quarts at once. I have a routine down for 3-4 quarts at a time, which works out well. I do this a few times while cucumbers are locally available, and in this way have a nice supply for the year.
Pickling is associated with canning. Canning involves processing the caning jars full of pickles or what have you in hot water to kill any microbes that will spoil your food under non-refrigerated storage. Processing the pickles freaks a lot of people out and I was definitely one of them (I was haunted by vague unsettling visions of dangerous pressure cookers.) It can also go badly if you do it too long, resulting in mushy pickles, which are pointless. The good news is, there are many types of pickles you do not have to process, as long as you keep them refrigerated. I do not process these pickles in hot water after I make them. Once the jars are cooled, they go right in the fridge, where they will keep for over a year and still be quite tasty.
I’m not a pickling expert. Quite frankly, my experiments beyond my basic dill pickle recipe have been mediocre at best (and sometimes just awful). However, I have hope that this summer’s experiments will work out better. I have a new guide: The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich. This revised edition came out this past spring. In addition to covering the basics, it is an excellent overview of all sorts of different types of pickles from many cultures. She conveniently includes many recipes on a smaller scale, so you can just make a couple of quarts of something, or even reduce her recipes to make just one quart if you like. Her “Really Quick Dill Pickle” recipe is almost exactly the same as mine, and so I decided to make my inaugural batch to open the 09 season adapting a combo of both recipes. It was really quick – the whole thing came together in less than an hour to make 4 quarts (the recipe in the book is for 3 quarts, but I had another quart’s worth of cucumbers so I adjusted the amounts of the recipe).
Simplest Dill Pickles
4 quart sized canning jars (aka Ball jars or Mason jars) with screw on lids, spotlessly clean and scalded (dunked in boiling water)
5 lbs of freshly harvested pickling cucumbers no larger than 2.5 inches, scrubbed clean, ends trimmed off and quartered (you really do need to look for cucumbers labeled for pickling for the best results)
1 garlic head (about 8-10 cloves) peeled and chopped course, divided into 4 equal portions
8 large dill heads, plus all of the sprigs of dill removed from the stalks, divided into 4 equal portions
6 tsp of pickling spice (1.5 tsp for each jar) OR 40 whole peppercorns (10 to each jar) and 12 whole dried peppers (3 to each jar)
(Whatever you use, make sure you buy it somewhere that has good turn around,old flavorless spices are pointless.)
3 1/4 cups of cider vinegar (Get the best quality that you can find — it makes a difference whether you use the good stuff instead of the generic. Some orchards that make apple cider also make excellent cider vinegar. Lately, I like the vinegar made by Dwight Miller Orchards, just up the road in Vermont.)
4 cups of water–filtered is best
1/4 cup + 2 tbs of pickling salt (Picking salt is a finely granulated plain salt that has none of the added iodine or stabilizers that table salt has. These additives will form a whitish sediment in your pickles that won’t spoil them, but will look funky. If you do not have pickling salt, substitute 1/2 cup of kosher salt–you need more because the flakes are larger and not as packed together.
Bring vinegar, water and salt to a boil, stir to make sure salt is dissolved. Keep warm over med heat, covered. Put one dill head, dill sprigs portion, garlic portion and spice portion in each jar. Put cucumber spears vertically in each jar, as many as will fit in one layer. Top with another dill head.
I like to put the jars on a cooling rack, because they do get hot when you add the brine. Ladle the hot brine into each jar to cover the contents, but only as far as the bottom of the ring on top of the jar.
Top with screw on lids and let cool for about 10 minutes. I suggest writing the date on top with a sharpie, plus anything else you want to remember about the batch. (I’ve noted which recipe from the Joy I sort of followed.) Allow to cool completely before refrigerating. Wait at least 2 weeks before eating for best flavor. The flavor evolves with time.
































