Dill Pickles

It's one of the most basic things to do in canning: dill cucumber pickles.  Even so, I think I have only made a couple of batches in my life.  I have an inventory and canning log going back to 2012 and it shows no dill pickles, only bread and butter ones--which I do most summers.  There's no garden this year, but in the past, my first choice with the cucumbers I harvested has been to do the sweet ones rather than dills.  The same has held when I've bought cucumbers for pickling.

That being said, I've wanted to get back into dill pickles for a while.  This year I finally have, and the process I followed was pretty easy.

The NCHFP page on fresh-pack dill pickles has a recipe and a process--it calls for pre-brining in a water and salt mixture.  As I have commented more than once in the past, the quantity of food the NCHFP recipe calls for is greater than I can stuff into jars.  On the page linked above, the "7 to 9 pints" recipe starts with 8 pounds of cucumbers.  So doubling that would lead to 16 pounds for 7 to 9 quarts.  I actually used 11 pounds for 8 quarts and my jars were packed.

.

I did not pre-brine my cucumbers.  Some canning recipes, like Ball's numerous versions, skip the brining step. I also increased the vinegar a bit; I don't want to use less than a 50/50 mix of vinegar and water.  This effectively yields a solution that is 2.5% acetic acid (the NCHFP recipe would yield a 2.1% concentration). An article written long ago tested botulism growth on whole-cucumber pickles and found that acetic acid concentrations of 0.9% or greater prevented spore growth and toxin formation (Keith Ito, et al.  "Effect of acid and salt concentration in fresh-pack pickles on the growth of Clostridium botulinum spores." Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 1976; 32(1):121-124).  They tested salt concentrations of 0%, 4%, and 8%, but also pre-brined and blanched the cucumbers.

I quartered most of the cucumbers, but further cut some in half--these can be seen in the photo above.  The small pieces I laid on top of the whole cucumbers, which were packed into the jars standing on end.  Unlike with the bread and butter pickles, jar-packing went fast--very fast.  Each jar only took a couple of minutes.  I also tried putting oak leaves (seen above in the bowl on the right) into some of the jars to see if they really help the pickles be crisper, as some sites allege.

As the pictures above and below show, my jars were packed about as tightly as possible. Even after processing, they're still full of cucumber with little empty space.  Increasing the cucumbers by 45% wouldn't be possible.