Bread and Butter Pickles

A couple of weeks ago I processed some cucumbers.  My overall harvest isn't going to be all that great; the vines are not looking like they'll produce that much longer.  But I did get enough for a load of bread and butter pickles, my favorite.  The Ball Blue Book and Pickyourown.org have similar recipes, which I generally follow.  One exception is that I don't salt and ice the cucumbers; I just fresh-pack them, cutting the salt a little. PYO mentions draining and rinsing after icing.  The NCHFP site calls for icing beforehand, as well, but skips the rinsing step. So although I use a bit less salt, my finished product might have more salt in the brine.  I end up with a brine that is about as salty as what one would get by using Mrs. Wages' bread and butter mix.

My cucumbers this year were all yellow (Edmonson from Southern Exposure and Miniature White from Seedsavers).  The recipes above call for onion, so I added some white onion slices, using store-bought ones (I haven't grown my own onions yet).

The procedure is pretty simple: slice; mix the brine (with the various spices indicated, plus sugar); add the slices (onion and cucumber) to jars; pour in the brine, and process.  I got about 1.1 lb. of cucumbers per quart (when mixed with the onion).  That's a bit less than anticipated by the recipes above, which suggest around 1.5 lb. per quart (or per two pints).  As I have noted elsewhere, I'm usually not able to pack as much into jars as the recipes suggest.  Hot- vs. raw-packing matters, but in this case the recipes are for raw pack, as well.  I had two bowls of cucumbers, not the one suggested by the picture above.  All that notwithstanding, I'm happy with the results (shown below is also a jar of pickled okra I threw in; I used a different brine mix for that).