Sweet Pickles 2018, and Re-Learning Canning Lessons

I'm not growing cucumbers this year, but I still did some sweet pickles.  Unlike in the past, the cucumbers I got were pickling size, rather than the sometimes very large ones I harvested out of my garden (I still would prefer home-grown...maybe next year).  At any rate, sweet aka bread-and-butter pickles are mostly easy.  I have used Mrs. Wages mix in the past, but more recently have started making my own mix following the Pickyourown.org and NCHFP sites, as noted before.  Also as noted previously: I don't do the salt-and-refrigerate thing; it's unnecessary.  My standard recipe is, for about 8 quarts:

8.5 lb. cucumbers
2 large onions

3 tbsp canning salt (based on Mrs. Winner’s mix)

8 c vinegar

9 c sugar

4 tbsp mustard seed

3 tbsp celery seed

2 tbsp turmeric

This time around, I had about that much in cucumbers and ended up with 8 quarts, 1 pint (my canner holds 8 quarts, so I had to do two runs, alas).  So in comparison to the last time I wrote about this, I got a little less packed into each jar.

Packing cucumber slices is tough, and it takes me a long time.  As I have noted on a number of occasions before, I have no idea how these canning recipes can contemplate stuffing so much into each jar.  According to the NCHFP site, I should've been able to get over 50% more cucumber into each jar.  It just can't be done, as far as I can see.

The brine mix is pretty sinus-clearing and eye-burning as it heats up.  I mix everything together and let it start to simmer while I'm cutting cucumbers.  As I have noted elsewhere, I have gotten better and more efficient at canning.  One obvious efficiency is to start the dishwasher while getting everything ready to go into the canner--I always run my jars through a cycle before canning, both to clean them and heat them.

So I did that this time.  That being said, I didn't get it quite right and was done slicing cucumbers about 20-30 minutes before the dishwasher was done. Once it finished its cycle, packing the jars was slow, as noted above.  It took me about an hour to fill the 9 jars (quarts and pint).

That's s l o w.

Partly I think I have forgotten what worked well in the past.  As a glance at the 2015 picture shows, the jars were pretty decently-packed.  Cucumbers have a lot of air in them, and will shrink in the jars as they're heated--there's no getting around that with raw pack.  But this time around, despite having smaller/easier cucumbers to work with and taking a long time, I did not (at a minimum) improve on 2015's performance.  I may even have regressed a little, judging by weight per jar.

I both can a lot and don't can much.  I usually only do one batch of anything per year, although I did a couple runs of applesauce last year and I've done multiple batches of preserves some years.  I've done multiple runs of apricots.  But there's a long enough gap in between for me to forget a few things.  Sigh.  It's simultaneously familiar and new each time I do it, I suppose.

The pickles did (or will) turn out great.  The only time I've screwed up a batch is when I used 1/2 cup of salt as called for in the other recipes, but without rinsing it off before canning.  Those were still edible, but definitely weren't all that good.