It's pickling time!

 Some mornings it's just too early for this...

So my lovely husband is a big fan of pickling. I think it's the Polish side of the family that he takes after. It doesn't take much because he's 75% Polish and 25% German. Either way the man loves to pickle.

He also loves to garden and when we get cucumbers from our garden and then his sister is sweet enough to share a grocery bag full of cucumbers from her own garden, we all know that it's pickling time!!

The prepping probably takes the most time. He likes to get all of his ingredients ready the night before. Here he's attacking some garlic cloves with a parring knife. They never saw it coming poor smelly buggars. You should see what he does to the cucumbers. I jest people...I jest.

What would pickling be without dill? This dill I harvested from the Keener Plaza's edible garden in downtown St. Louis. It's totally free to the public to harvest. So I took advantage. 

These are the cucumbers that met their demise. This is just ONE bowl full, we actually had enough for two huge bowls. Talk about a lot of pickles.

Here's the start of the Bartnick Pickle Recipe:

Clean and cut cucumbers. 

Boil a huge pot of water because once you get that water boiling hot you are going to pour that water over those cucumbers and let that stand for about 10 minutes.

In the meantime get your canning jars ready to boil and get sterilized.

For the Brine you are going to bring to a boil:

3 quarts of water

1 quart of white vinegar 

1/4 cup of salt

2-4 Tablespoons of Alum

Note: We used that amount of vinegar and for us that was too much so we cut the vinegar in half this go around; just a heads up. You kind of have to tweak it to your liking. This might take a time or two.

Place Dill, 6-8 peppercorns, 4-6 cloves of garlic and hot pepper flakes to taste in the clean hot jars that you see above. Just make sure you remove the water first. 

Pack cucumbers in jars tightly, pour brine over the top and seal tight immediately.

So here we are. We've drained the jars from the boiling water bath, we've added the dill, peppercorns, garlic cloves, hot pepper flakes and the cucumbers. It's always best to put the brine in with the help of a ladle and a funnel.  Fill the jar up to almost the top or until you have about an inch to an inch and a quarter of space. Remember to check the lip of the jar for any chips or cracks before you put the jar lid on. Also, if you've never canned before or pickled before you need to heat the lids up on the stove top too. Low heat is fine, this will allow the jars to help seal properly.

As you can see we are a Ball family.

Also to note: We did two types of pickling. The first type was just the regular old fashion pickling method which is the method I just shared above. The second method was one I learned in a canning class that the Missouri Botanical Gardens of St. Louis offers. Fun classes to go to if you ever get a chance. Anyway, I digress, the second way is the microwavable way. Yes, you can pickle in a microwave. Supposedly if you do it this way you get the pickles that really snap! I'm willing to take their word for it, but just for fun we decided to do a pickling experiment. Yes, pickling and science, I know I'm excited about it too!

So instead of boiling that water in the first part of the directions, you leave that out because what we are going to do is after we've packed our jars with all the goodies, and after we pour the brine in, we just pop that jar in the microwave for three minutes on high. That's right folks, three minutes, that's it.

After you've taken it out of the microwave, wipe the rim of the jar with a wet paper towel to get any gunk off, put the jar top on, screw the lid down and you're done.

Et Viola! 

So here's the experiment, we've marked the microwaveable ones with a M. The old school pickling ones we left without an M. So hopefully we'll crack one of these open in about a week and see what's what.

The joys of pickling from our house to yours.

Hope you try to experiment in your kitchens soon too!

Total time to pickle 12 jars, without the night before prep time, about two hours.