After posting the photos of the pickles I’ll be giving to friends and family over the holidays, I realized that I never got around to posting the recipe for these great dill pickles.
This recipe is adapted from the Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving Favourite Dill Pickles recipe. I doubled this recipe without any issues. I used the 8 & 16 oz Ball Jar Elite, which are sort of a funny shape for pickles, hence the untraditional dill slices. They’re a hit though, excellent on or with a sandwich. This recipe should make about 8 x 16 oz jars, the spicing is written out for the 16 oz jars, just half it for the smaller ones.
Although I really like the taste and the crispness is fine, next year I’ll brine them over night in the refrigerator. It just makes a better pickle and its really not that much extra work.
16-20 small pickling cucumbers (about 3lbs/1.5kg)
2 cups white vinegar
2 cups water
2 tbsp pickling salt
1 tbsp granulated sugar
1 head of fresh dill per jar
1 small clove of garlic per jar
1/2 teaspoon of mustard per jar
Cut your cucumbers up into the desired shape, slices, hunks, it doesn’t mater.
Combine vinegar, water, salt and sugar in a large stainless steel or enamel saucepan and bring to a boil.
Prepare your hot jars. Place 1 head fresh dill, 1 clove garlic (I used the little bit of garlic I grew this year) and ½ teaspoon of mustard seeds (I found two different colours at the Big Carrot, their organic spice section is phenomenal) in each pint jar.
Meeling says
Yum! I love dill pickles and the homemade ones are the best by far!!
Laura says
They're just so much better!
Ott, A says
Those are such pretty jars! I would be proud to have those sitting on my pantry shelf. Thanks for linking up to my canning week blog party.
Kirstin says
I am really excited to try this as I have an abundance of cucumbers (they seem to be the one thing I can grow) can you do this by keeping the cucumbers whole and processing them in a quart jar?
admin says
For sure Kirstin, I think the processing time should just be longer. 15 minutes? The bernardin website should have a processing time chart.