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Cheap and Easy Dill Pickle Recipe

We suddenly really wanted a dill pickle. We had been in New Zealand for about two years, and realized we hadn’t had a fat juicy pickle in two years. We searched and found some sweet-sour dills that weren’t too bad, but they weren’t the salty-sour style Americans think of. As luck would have it, we were just planting our garden, so we rushed out and bought a packet of cheap gherkin cucumber seeds.  Unlike last year when our lemon cukes struggled to produce a few walnut sized fruits, our plants are huge and healthy this year. And a few weeks ago, we were suddenly the proud parents of five adorably ugly, pimply and plump 3-4 inch pickling cukes.

We have done a little small batch canning, but we’ve never made proper pickles before, so we scanned our cookbook collection and the web for recipes. James Beard’s American Cookery had a suspiciously easy version, and ones on the web seemed a bit complicated.  None, of course, was scaled for making one jar of pickles. Yet, the cukes need to be used while they are fresh and we wanted to perfect our recipe before the full onslaught of fruiting.

So, here is our successfully adapted method for making one jar of delicious, authentic American dill pickles. It’s a little more sanitary than the James Beard cold pack, but still allows for fermented, homemade flavor. Obviously, this recipe can be scaled up if you come into more than five pickles at once.

Small Batch Dill Pickles

Finished Product

Ingredients:

5  3-4 inch pickling cucumbers
2  cups boiling water
1 1/2  Tablespoons salt
1  Tablespoon pickling spices*
1  teaspoon dill seeds (or 1 head of dill weed)
1/2  cup vinegar (we used mostly white with 2 Tablespoons malt added)
1  large clove garlic

Procedure:

Boil a kettle of water. Fill a 2 cup glass measuring cup and use the rest to sterilize a glass wide mouth one quart jar and lid (reusing a pickle jar should work or the widest shortest quart jar you can find.)

Make brine by adding the salt and garlic to the measuring cup. Let that cool to handling temperature. Then thoroughly scrub and trim the ends off of the cucumbers. Drain the jar and lay it on its side to stack in the cukes. Stand the jar up and sprinkle in the spices and vinegar. Pour in  brine to fill the jar. If the jar is not full and the pickles are not floating, add just enough boiled water until they float.

It’s important to keep them fully submerged but they want to float, so try to find a small ramekin or something to weight them down with. We ended up using a small plastic funnel which pushed them all under but stuck out of the top of the jar. We then covered the funnel with a small plate. Otherwise, you will need to turn the top pickles daily to ensure they get fully brined.

Leave the jar in a warm place to begin fermenting. You will see small bubbles forming within 24 hours. This is a natural part of the process, and this ratio of salt and vinegar prevents nasties from growing. We didn’t get lots of bubbling, and after just 4-5 days days the bubbling subsided. At this point, some of the pickles sank to the bottom of the jar, but otherwise seemed normal. Move the pickles to the fridge and wait a week to eat for the best flavor. We were so excited, we ate them all within a week, and even then they kept getting saltier. Next time, we will move them to another jar with a lighter brine (1 teaspoon salt ).

The results exceeded our expectations. We are now ready for the next batch. We want to reuse our brine, though some advise against it. We are confident we have kept it clean (using a fork not fingers to remove the pickles), and we just need to recharge it with more salt and vinegar. We will add 2 teaspoons salt and 1/4 cup or more vinegar. {Note: We did try reusing our brine, and it was okay but the flavor was not as good. We definitely won’t go beyond one reuse.}

* Pickling Spices

You can buy pickling spices already mixed. We are mad collectors of spices, but having never made pickles or pickled meats before we didn’t have any pickling spices on hand. We found several mix recipes online, and adapted them to what we had in the cupboard that sounded good for dill pickles. We made extra so we are ready when the next jarsful of cukes ripen.

1 Tablespoon mixed black and yellow mustard seeds
1 Tablespoon coriander seeds
1 Tablespoon dill seeds
1 Teaspoon carroway seeds
1 Teaspoon whole cloves
2 Teaspoons black peppercorns
1 Teaspoon cumin seeds
1 Teaspoon fennel seeds
5  bay leaves, crushed
1  dried red chili, crushed
1/2 star anis, crushed

That’s a long list, but this was super easy to make. We just measured each of the whole spices into a spice jar, and put the bay, chili and star anis into a mortar and pestle to bash them up a bit then stirred them into the mix. Done. If we’d had cinnamon sticks we would have put one in, crushed, but everyone said to avoid using ground spices because they become overpowering and excessively darken the pickles.

This article was written on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 and is filed under Making Creations. For more articles about: canning (1), food (1), recipes (2)

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