Make Your Own Pickles

The advent of summer vegetables brings an abundance of cheap cucumbers at the farmers market – 3 for $1 – and $2 will buy you enough to make about two quarts of pickles.

Experienced canners may find the the humble pickled cucumber old hat, but I always have an appetite for the cold, crisp refrigerated dill spear, especially in summer.

I use the kosher dill recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, but I add vinegar to taste because I like the bite. (True kosher dills have no vinegar). With perhaps 15 minutes of work and four hours or more of waiting you have a pickle to rival brand name refrigerator dills at about a quarter the cost.

At Food In Jars there’s a Garlic Dill recipe that you can make using either boiling water process or the straight to the fridge method.

Note that there is some lack of clarity from official sources regarding safe handling procedures. The old method for making refrigerator dills involved fermenting the pickles at room temperature for a week before refrigerating, but that method is no longer recommended because of the risk of listeria. Read this thread on a GardenWeb forum to get a look at some of the admittedly muddy issues.