Quite a Pickle: How We Spent Our Saturday

About a year ago, we first received a small handful of gorgeous pickling cucumbers in our much-beloved weekly farmer's CSA box, and lacking the proper equipment, knowledge or free time to launch a large-scale canning operation, I cast about the Internet for some "quick pickling" recipes to help turn our cukes into dill pickles. These recipes generally consisted of copious amounts of dill, garlic, sliced onion and spices along with a heavy brine, and required only a day or two of sitting and a few days of refrigeration before being ready to consume. To my surprise, they were awesome - crisp and flavorful, if not quite as brine-soaked as long-term honest-to-god pickles.

It's once again the season for these types of cucumbers, and when our CSA farmer sent out an email offering bulk prices for larger orders, we decided to make the plunge. A mere $15 brought 10 pounds of perfect pickling cucumbers to our door (well, the farmer's market where we pick up our box). All that was left was....everything else, including a crash course on canning and preserving. I scrounged around for recipes and tips and ended up purchasing my very first "For Dummies" book, while Jane made a special trip up to Escondido to the delightful Hawthorne Country Store, overflowing with canning and preserving supplies in addition to things like live baby chicks (which Jane almost scooped up - I told her to wait until we do some research on local zoning laws and how many chickens one can legally own). She came home with a massive water-bath canner, jar rack and jar lifter. I visited the local co-op for Mason jars and the ingredients needed to make a brine and induce the pickling (dill, garlic, peppers, etc.). We were set.

10 pounds of cucumbers can pose a formidable cleaning and scrubbing challenge. Given Jane's childhood memories of preserving and drying, she was much more used to the sight of such large quantities of a single food item than I was.

After much scrubbing, the cucumbers were placed in cold water with ice cubes and salt to help chill and crisp them before the pickling.

The Mason jars were also cleaned and readied for use.

Surprisingly, I found the peeling of individual garlic cloves to be the most tedious exercise of the entire endeavor. I'm normally a master at peeling garlic, but our two heads proved to be somewhat finicky. The recipe I chose called for two cloves of garlic in each jar of pickles, one at the bottom and one on the top.

We decided to slice our cucumbers into individual spears for pickling, rather than keeping them whole, mostly for issues of space. Jane set about the monumental task of slicing 10 pounds of cucumbers.

Another herculean task was actually getting the water in the water-bath kettle to come to a boil. I suspect we used more gas on this day than we did during the entire month of June. And on a warmish Southern California day, the heat within the room soon became noticeable.

I chose a recipe that would offer a little bit of a snap. Each jar would have one dried red chili pepper and a garlic clove on the bottom....

...along with handfuls of dill and a variety of spices (I alternated between peppercorns, cloves, bay leaves and mustard seeds). Several of the recipes I read noted that placing whole grape leaves inside the jars helped maintain pickle crispness, and while I have no idea why this might be the case, I decided to take advantage of our grape vines growing in the backyard. We carefully cleaned the leaves, sliced them lengthwise, and placed one of the bottom and one of the top of each each jar.

All the while, my homemade brine was boiling on the stove top - a thick concoction of salt, vinegar and water (a later batch made use of apple cider vinegar, which offers a milder taste). Jane used her new jar rack and jar lifter to introduce the jars to the hot water in order to avoid cracking or breaking - a common problem which we managed to avoid.

With the jars stuffed full with cucumbers, dill, garlic, spices, peppers and grape leaves, the hot brine was ready to be poured in and the lids and screw bands tightened.

One of the most important steps of the entire process was to use a non-metallic spatula to help release air bubbles within the brined jar. Trapped air causes liquid levels to drop during heating, which may result in improper head space for the cucumbers.

Finally, the filled and lidded jars were placed within the jar rack - seven for each bath.

These were placed into the boiling water bath, where they needed to sit, completely covered, for a full 10 minutes of boiling before being removed. They were then moved over to our kitchen table for cooling.

We ended up making 19 quarts of pickles, working from 9:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. For our last batch, we sat around the kitchen table and waited for the welcome and wonderful sound of our jars signalling we'd done everything right - the satisfactory "pop" as the cooling jars sealed themselves and safely contained the products inside. This gentle thunk means the difference between a batch of semi-preserved food that must be consumed within a week and a batch that will safely keep for upwards of two years. Every single jar sealed properly, thanks, perhaps, to my gentle chiding.

We'll have to wait at least six weeks before we'll know if our brine and ingredients were combined properly to create tasty dill pickles. I have no doubt that at least some of the 19 jars won't be the finest offerings on the market. But it was a good first try at a somewhat vanishing skill. Our cucumbers now rest in the darkness of the study closet, tucked away into a corner of the house that suffers the least amount of sunlight or heat. Come August, we'll start to sample. If we're pleased with the results, some of you may well receive some jars of homemade pickles as autumn commences.

Our next farm box, due to arrive tomorrow afternoon, apparently comes with a new (small) batch of pickling cucumbers. I have no idea what we're going to do.