But let me begin at the beginning.
The very beginning: I love fermenting and canning food. One of my fundamental beefs with cooking and baking is that, well, things expire. Since my girl E and I are the only ones in our apartment and we generally buy and cook our meals separately, I'm buying and cooking for one person. So, say I want chicken one night. Since it's basically impossible to find uncooked single servings of chicken breast/thighs, by buying the 7 or 8 thighs or breasts I'm committing myself to eating chicken for the next two or three nights. And what if I'm not home? What if I REALLY REALLY don't want chicken?
Not taken by me, obviously. Who has a shadowless white background lying around for food photoshoots?
Not a serious problem, I know, I know. A *grocery* problem. You know the kind. In short, I'd love it if I could roast a whole chicken and eat it slowly over a few weeks. Better yet, and endless supply of forever fresh fish. Ah, a girl can dream.
So if I can somehow find a way to make food last longer, and make it more delicious in the process: that's me striking gold. Enter fermenting, canning, preserving, the works. If it's in a mason jar, I'm down. Enter jams, jellies, salsas, and...pickles!
The even more fundamental beginning: I love pickles. Tangy, crunchy dill pickles. Mmmmmm. I *don't* love long, complicated recipes. So when I found a recipe for pickles in a book I was reading that was about 4 sentences long, I was there. And I shall now pass it on to you, in a slightly more structured but equally vague way. I'll let you come up with exact amounts of ingredients based on your taste and the pictures. I made enough to fill 2 mason jars.
Ingredients:
1 big bunch of dill (I used a lot as it's my favorite herb)
5-6 persian cucumbers (smaller and a little sweeter than regular cucumbers)
10 cloves of garlic
4-5 large grape leaves
Brine - enough to fill jars
Directions:
1. First off, make the brine. If you've never made brine before, it's easy at its simplest: just salt and water. I recommend you read this how-to for optimal brine making. I used kosher salt, so the ratio was 1 1/2 - 2 cups of salt per gallon of water (kosher salt, lacking iodine, weighs less than table salt).
2. Tear up the grape leaves. Why grape leaves, you ask? They have tannin, which helps keep the pickles crunchy. I wish I could tell you where to buy grape leaves, but alas, I just took 'em from my grapes growing in the backyard.
3. Chop/don't chop the cucumbers. I made one jar with whole cucumbers (2-3 fit in the jar) and one with sliced ones. If you're only making 1 jar, I recommend slicing them, as it's easier to see their progress during the fermenting process.
4. Dice the garlic.
5. Chop the dill. I cut off most of the stem and slice up the rest of it almost to the point of mincing.
6. Stick everything in the jars! With the whole cucumbers, you kind of have to stuff it all where it'll fit. With the sliced ones, you can be more creative with your layering process.
7. Finally, cover it with brine and seal the jars.
8. Now, very important: put the jars in a storage place with a constant temperature of around 75 degrees fahrenheit. Plus or minus 5 degrees is fine. Leave to ferment for two weeks. This is the optimal temperature/time combo. If the temperature is cooler, they will take longer to ferment, and vice versa.
My lil pickles just after preparation.
After about a week and a half, this is what mine looked like:
Once everything in the jar is this shade of muted green and the pickles are mostly translucent, depending how thick you sliced them, they're ready! Remember that once you open the jar, their new home is the refrigerator. I'm serious, fridge 'em.
A uniquely Juliana snack: one pickle slice on a tiny plate.
You should know these are going to taste different than store-bought pickles, because unlike store-bought pickles, these are not pickled in vinegar. These are real live fermented pickles, folks (the difference can be confusing - read this!). So they have a softer taste, less sharply vinegar-y and more sweetly tangy. I didn't know if I would like it, honestly, but I DID. Thank goodness. I might never go back to store-bought if I can help it.
How do I know I'm not crazy? My mother loved them. Aaaannnddd success.
Enjoy, y'all.
xoxo
Juliana
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