Not so quick pickles

Life has been crazy busy around here – we bought a house, moved, and have been simultaneously fixing up the old place while unpacking the new place. The new kitchen took nearly a month to reach functionality, and several more weeks to get back to the fun stuff, but things are bubbling along now.

I planted up the veggie garden in the old house so the raised beds weren’t just empty or full of weeds, and now the cucumber harvest is coming in. We eat a lot of fresh cucumber in salads, and in my dairy-eating days, I used to make an amazing cold soup with cucumber and yogurt. Now though, I’ve turned my hand to fermented pickles. I haven’t found a fancy way to use the pickles once made, so this recipe is only useful if you like eating pickles. Luckily, I do 🙂

How-to

The basic idea is exactly like the other fermented vegetable pickles: immerse the vegetables in a brine of water and kosher salt (or pickling salt); add spices to suit your taste; let ferment. For the jars I put up in July, I used plenty of garlic, some coriander seed, peppercorns, and red pepper flakes. the brine that worked for me in this hot, hot weather was 3 tbsp salt to 4 cups water. I keep the house air-conditioned at about 74F, but when it’s hot outside, the kitchen seems to warm up fast and cool down slow. Remember, more salt slows the fermentation, while warmth speeds it up. I keep an eye on how much salt I use for snacking items, because I don’t want my treats to be inedible :).

Nitty-gritty

There are a few additional details for cucumbers:

• Use fresh pickling cucumbers. These are smaller than the waxy green behemoths you get from the store, and have great flavor. The smaller size helps them ferment easily and evenly without a lot of chopping down to size. If you were diligent about getting them small, you could make yourself some fermented cornichons, which would be great for summer cheese and charcuterie boards.
• Rub off the spines – they don’t feel so good in the mouth.
• trim off the blossom end of the cucumber. I actually trim both ends, and I tend to cut them in half or into spears, because that’s how I like to eat them.
• Add 1 clean grape leaf to each jar to keep the pickles crunchy.

I had to use my fermentation tops this time around, because these babies got going fast, and the last thing I wanted was pickle explosions in the new kitchen. Less than a week on the counter in a cool, dark corner made for good half-sour pickles. I have one jar that is going on it’s 3rd week and is quite sour to my taste. It could go longer, but I prefer my pickles not quite fully sour.

Results

After a few days, this was the state of play in my jars (and yes, I asked the man to open the jar because it was tight, and I’m smart enough not to put myself in the way of pressurized pickle juice, hehe):

And that was when I put the fermentation tops on! Anyway, this turns out to be a very straightforward process. Just keep the vegetables submerged in the liquid, skim the surface of the liquid once in a while if it looks scummy, and do something to make sure the jar doesn’t explode, if you keep them in jars instead of crocks. I highly recommend this process if you like pickles and can obtain small cucumbers.