Pickles!

Yesterday, Andrea (the wife of my cousin, Michael) came over fully loaded to spend the day making pickles with me! She's a seasoned veteran of canning all sorts of things after growing up on a farm and spending years learning about veggies but it was my first time. (All of the useful information in this post was provided by Andrea. Andrea, if you read this and I've gotten something wrong, tell me and I'll fix it!) I was hoping that canning was something that I would enjoy as it can be another way to save money and get more local food in our diets year round.

So the plan for yesterday was dill pickles. The recipe we used was as follows...

4 litres of cucumbers
fresh dill
fresh garlic
100mL pickling salt (for some reason I wrote down pickling "cheese" rather than salt...)
500mL vinegar
1.5L water

Wash cucumbers and cut in half lengthwise (we opted to slice some of ours to create "sandwich" pickles)

Some were small enough that they didn't need to be cut at all.

Slicing them this way took less time that we thought it would.

Peel garlic and separate cloves. Cut dill to fit in jars.

We also put some jalapeno peppers in some of the jars to make hot and spicy pickles.

Combine salt, vinegar and water in a large pot and bring to a boil. (Sorry no picture).

Place jar seals in a pot of hot (not boiling water).

Place the jars (just the jar not the lid and seal) on a cookie sheet in the oven to warm them. The key to canning is to put HOT liquid into a HOT jar, this is what creates the seal.

Andrea warned that we should make them too hot or the jars can crack when putting the liquid in. I forget what she heated the oven to...

Place a sprig of dill and a clove of garlic in each HEATED jar.

Put cucumbers into the jars, as many as you can.

Fill each jar with brine and top the jars with hot seals.

Screw the ring on and place the jars to sit for a while (I'm not sure how long, ours sat overnight) to give them time to seal before moving them.

We did about 40 jars of pickles, some big jars and some smaller. It took us about 4 hours or so. It wasn't hard at all, but it was long and time consuming. I was very tired at the end of the day!

When the brine is first poured over the pickles, they turn bright green (like the jar on the right) and then begin quite quickly to turn brown like the jar on the left.

I'll definitely can again next year! I'll try something different and probably rope Andrea in to help me out!