To make pickles, you’ll need a basic brine (a mixture of vinegar, sugar, and salt, dissolved in water) whose overall flavor can be tweaked with spices like whole black peppercorns, red pepper flakes, dill seed, mustard seed, or garlic cloves, and aromatic herbs, like fresh dill, spring...
How to store cucumbers to maximize their shelf-life: It doesn’t matter if your cukes came from the grocery store, the farmers market, or your own backyard—these cucumber storage tips will keep the cylindrical fruit fresh and crisp. A little bit of prep time upfront will produce worthwhile...
If you are going to go to the trouble of canning vinegar pickles, you’ll need large quantities of cucumbers at once. Between boiling up your vinegar, packing your jars, loading up your water bath canner and getting that beast to boil, it’s too much work to do in small batches. With...
Cucumbers require fertile soil. Before planting, add about 2 inches of organic matter (aged manure and/or compost) and a complete fertilizer to the area. The soil should be moist but well-draining (not soggy) and have a pH of around 6.5 to 7.0. When to Plant Cucumbers For an early cro...
that needs to be served hot. Look for recipes you can make in advance. Marinated cheese or spiced olives are great because you can make them a few days ahead; serve with fresh sliced bread from a local bakery for dunking in the flavorful oil. For one of the recipes you plan ...
Let’s make a dill Typically made of pickled cucumbers and dill to season, dill pickles are so easy to eat that you could munch on them plain. In fact, some even take to the taste of pickle juice from dill pickles, sipping on every little bit of it. Others add the juice to their ...
or the processing destroyed the crunch or the brine was too sweet or the cucumbers were bitter. Eventually, however, I figured it out: a pickled vegetable that remains crisp for two years on the shelf is, it turns out, easy to make, as long as you can get really fresh cucumbers and ...
Tips for Making Sour Pickles To make sour pickles, you'll need to prepare a saltwater brine by warming water and salt together, and then cooling it to room temperature. After that, you'll pack a jar with fresh cucumbers, garlic, dill, and other spices. Next, pour the brine over the ...
I’ve tried a number of options, and you can honestly make just about any pickle recipe just using carrots instead of cucumbers. That said, I don’t recommend using the brine frombread and butter picklesfor carrots. There’s a lot going on in those spice-wise, and they’re really sweet...
Not only did that mean not running out of rosemary on a whim, but it also shifted my priorities to concentrate on using up the fragile, fresh produce I had quickly, and storing the rest as smartly as possible so it would last. It was a good way to make sure I wasn't wasting food...