Kitchen DIY: Cucumber-palooza!
When life give you cucumbers, make pickles!
We’ve had a weirdly rainy August, which I should have expected since I invested time and money in putting in a drip watering system. Sigh. That said, I think all that rain (9 inches since August 1st in my unofficial garden rain gauge) has meant a bumper crop of cucumbers.
I love pickles and plant a lot of cucumber plants with that in mind. I do refrigerator pickles, which require no canning, as well as canning some for the winter. I made dill pickles last year for the first time and they were not a success in my book: way too limp by the time I opened the jars during the winter. I found a recipe this year for bread and butter pickles that call for icing the pickles down in the refrigerator for several hours before canning (which is really cooking them when you think about it) and I hope that will make a difference.
Dill Refrigerator Pickles
From Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen, one of my favorite blogs, this recipe is miraculous. Just a few ingredients and a few hours and you’ll have these wonderfully fresh, crisp dill pickles. Sometimes I just heap them on my plate as a side salad; they’re that good. They’ll stay crunchy for a few weeks, if they last that long. I make them in my favorite ½ gallon Mason jars. All you need are those small pickling cucumbers, white vinegar, fresh dill, and pickling salt (which is salt with no additives; most salt has an anti-caking element added, and that make the pickling liquid cloudy or turn the pickles dark). You can find the recipe here for the proportions.
I cut my cucumbers on a kitchen mandolin and it makes quick and uniform work of it. I do use all safety precautions (the hand guard down to the last nub, and then a steel glove that I got at Bed, Bath, and Beyond). Those suckers are sharp! Deb says to slice them 1/8” thick but that’s too thin for me; I set the mandolin for ¼” but to each his or her own.
It looks like not enough vinegar at first, but a few hours in the refrigerator and the salt draws out liquid from the cukes to form its own brine.
Bread and Butter Pickles, canned and refrigerator
I found this recipe on Simply Recipes , and I like the spice mixture a lot. We’ll see if icing the pickles will keep them crunchy by the winter. I also did a round of refrigerator bread and butter pickles, adapting the same recipe. If you follow this recipe, do pay attention to the saltiness when you rinse the pickles after they chill in the refrigerator; I rinsed them pretty well but they are still a touch too salty to my taste.
Besides pickles (I told you I had a bumper crop of cucumbers!), I also love a good herby cucumber yogurt soup; very refreshing on a warm summer night. I’m also up to my eyeballs in fresh herbs, so this soup recipe from Food and Wine was appealing using dill, parsley, and tarragon.
Happy cucumber season everybody!