It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

After the quick jar-filling exercise with the dill pickles, I got what I thought was an inspired notion to keep the cucumbers more or less together after slicing crosswise, as for bread and butter pickles.  That, I thought, would help fill the jars faster because I could just dump in the poker chip-like stacks of cucumbers that were all aligned with each other, then fill in the gaps with shards of sliced onion.

It didn't really work out as planned.  These cucumbers were a little larger in diameter, but as I was packing the jars I belatedly recalled that I had to break up single-cucumber sets and fit the long  spears into a lot of small spaces while jar-packing with the dills.  It may have helped some, but wasn't the quick and easy fix I'd anticipated.  Still, packing went a lot faster for this second batch of the season.

It also illustrates at least one reason why smaller cucumbers are favored for pickling.  I've canned some huge ones. But it is undeniably easier with smaller cucumbers.

In other news, the cost of cucumbers, onion, sugar, and spices for this batch was less than $15 for 8 quarts (actually, 7 quarts and 2 pints).  A quick check of Amazon finds bread and butter pickles going for about $2 per pint or more--many varieties are made with high fructose corn syrup, though sugared (and even sugar-free) types are available.  As long as the time value doesn't exceed half the minimum wage, homemade ones are a bargain...

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.

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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.

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.

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).