Posts Tagged ‘pickles’
Pickles!
When my daughter was here visiting recently, I made Sweet Lime Pickles. Sarah loved them until she realized they had so much sugar in them. Heh.
There are no limes involved. Instead, you soak your sliced cukes in a mixture of pickling lime and water over night. I first made these when an online friend asked me to. Had no idea what they were like. I’m not from the south, and had never even heard of them.
Well, I really like them. I also like how the pickles come out brilliantly crisp, unlike most home canned pickles which are just soggy yuck. Anyhow, I had to search for pickling lime, and found it at a smaller grocery store. WallyWorld for sure didn’t have it. I didn’t like the recipe on the jar of lime, tho… it didn’t call for pickling spice and I =knew= that the pickles I’d made before had that.
Some hunting online for recipes and an email to my friend… and I had a recipe that contained pickling spice. All was well, and I made 4 quart jars and 2 pint jars, plus had enough syrup left to do 2 more quarts of “fresh” pickles. Those are just freshly sliced cukes with the boiling syrup poured over, and then put in the fridge. (and I haven’t tasted them yet, they look very different)
Anyhow. I’m in WallyWorld the other day by the canning supplies and what do I see? Pickling Lime. Not in a jar, in a bag. Same brand (Mrs. Wages) and the recipe on the back is DIFFERENT than the one on the jar. It contains pickling spice. HUH. But I didn’t buy any. One big jar should last me for 3 major pickle sessions.
Which brings us to today. Tuesday I got a bucket nearly full of cukes from my neighbor. Wednesday I washed, sliced, and put them into their bucket of pickling lime and water. Today I rinsed them a bunch, then set them to soak for a few hours.
On the agenda: make bread and butter pickles which are one of my favorites. Ron asked me to make some, his grandma used to make them and he loved em.
Had to make a trip to the store, I needed vinegar, sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, new lids, onions, and maybe some dill seed and garlic to make dill pickles.
I looked at the shelf where the pickling lime had been earlier this week… and it’s gone. Shoot, and I was going to buy some more, just in case.
(BTW, I am still boiling up sliced cukes…. I didn’t have enough room in the pot even with extra syrup and have already put up 4 quart jars)
There are as many Bread and Butter pickle recipes out there as there are any other recipes. I modified what I found to leave out the tumeric and exchanged some white sugar for brown sugar for the color.
Here is a recipe for the syrup I did:
8 cups white vinegar (5%)
6 cups sugar
2 cups brown sugar
3 tablespoons mustard seed
1.5 tablespoons celery seed
1 tablespoon pickling or kosher salt
.5 tablespoon pickling spice
For the cukes… Well, I mix up my solution of 2 gallons of water and 1 cup of pickling lime, then I start slicing cukes and mixing them in. One thing I did this time was to not dump the slices in all stuck to each other. Easier to mix them if they aren’t stuck in clumps, plus it’s easier for the lime water to penetrate. When it starts looking too full, I quit adding cukes. I didn’t have room in the pot for all of them this time, even with extra syrup made. If you have too many cukes, just set them aside OR make a bit more syrup. There is ALWAYS syrup left over, so you can add more cukes after you pack some into jars and fill them with syrup.
For a ballpark guess, I’d say about 6 lbs of cukes for that much syrup.
Plus, I put in a bunch of sliced onions. I used 4 onions, halved and then slices as thin as I could.
I’m not processing pickles this year, I’m doing hot pack. With that much sugar and vinegar the chance of getting food poisoning is about as likely as winning the lottery.
So, I use a slotted spoon to put the pickles into the jars. Then I bring the syrup back to a rolling boil before filling the jars. Get the bubbles out, and put the lids and rings on. Then turn upside down for 5 min. or so to heat those seals.
With the last quart and a half of cuke slices, I added a big heaping teaspoon of minced garlic to the syrup while they were cooking. All the onions were pretty much gone into the first 4 jars. I am thinking that garlic might taste good, too… We’ll see. I only got a jar and part of a jar. The partial jar will go in the fridge and tasted first.
Next up is dill pickles. But not today. Maybe over the weekend… I will probably do dill spears as I prefer my dill pickles that way. Widemouth quarts… I can do some looong pickles! (all the cukes I use are slicers, I prefer them to pickling cukes) Unfortunately I had to buy dill seed at the store… couldn’t find any dill seed heads at the big farmers market in town. Some day I will grow it and keep the caterpillars off of it and save it to make pickles with. Dills just look so much nicer with that sprig of seed head in there. Dill seed will work, and perhaps this winter I will prepare a spot for some dill, get the seeds in the ground early enough, not forget and mow it down… keep the bugs off… and then save it until cuke season arrives. That’s the problem, why it’s not at the farmers market. Dill has done it’s thing by the time anyone is getting cukes. And if you don’t cut those seed heads at the right time, all the seeds fall off.
Well, this was a nice long post. Just as rambling as usual for me, lol! I’ll take a photo of the jars of pickles perhaps tomorrow. Not to mention I want to pull out all my bags of berries to show how overloaded I am this year! Need better light for pictures, however.
Happily done with pickles for the night,
Vyx
