A Sour Attempt At Pickling

     Puns aside though, this was a colossal disaster: please in no way follow any of my instructions to make this or your hopes for pickles will turn into salty seas of sadness.
    My brother subscribes to get a farmer's basket every other month with various vegetables (I call it Hippy Harvest); a few weeks ago we got a few pickling cucumbers from the farmer's basket. Now, I love pickles. LOVE THEM. I used to be the kid who would buy a cup of frozen pickle juice for 50 cents while at the skating rink- Or, if I was feeling incredibly wasteful with my allowance, I would get an entire giant pickle. And while I can't quite stomach that much acid at a time any more, there is nothing I like better than sneaking a little crunchy pickle snack into my day.
    So, I thought, I should make my own pickles! What a grand adventure it will be- battling all the possibly dangerous bacteria floating around in home canned pickles (well, so say the critics). And of course, should I go with the classic kosher pickle recipe, using lacto-fermentation (mostly salt) or the modern stand-by (mostly vinegar.) Since I have had so many vinegar pickles, I decided to go with salted pickles. The theory is that as the brine increases in it's fermenting, the salty cucumbers will excrete salt in the form of a sour, tanginess. Or something more scientific than that. So the longer you leave the good bacteria to do it's thing, the more sour your pickles become. And they continue to ferment until they are eaten and "go bad."
     But for some reason, I didn't actually try to follow the recipe that the video pickle-guys used. Instead, I used a recipe from a random cookbook. And while I am sure the recipe was great, I apparently can't convert a recipe for one large crock into the three jars I ended up using. Instead of splitting the mixture between the three jars adn then adding water (as the directions for the crock recipe said to), I added all the salt mixture to one jar and then made a new batch. the amount of salt I used was a bit extreme (1/3 cup for the big jar and another 1/3 cup split between the smaller jars); this is expesially ridiculous when you look at the measurements from the first video (1 tablespoon per jar.) Yikes! As soon as I tried them, I winced in salt-shock and I was still tasting salt in my mouth hours after I tested them. I should have just put the slices over my eyes and called it quits for the day.

     I found a couple of really good videos explaining the process, which I will post below:

How to Make Dill Pickles with Lacto-Fermentation 

How to Make Fermented Dill Pickles 

    But for some reason, I didn't actually try to follow the recipe that the video pickle-guys used. Instead, I used a recipe from a random cookbook. And while I am sure the recipe was great, I apparently can't convert a recipe for one large crock into the three jars I ended up using. Instead of splitting the mixture between the three jars adn then adding water (as the directions for the crock recipe said to), I added all the salt mixture to one jar and then made a new batch. the amount of salt I used was a bit extreme (1/3 cup for the big jar and another 1/3 cup split between the smaller jars); this is expesially ridiculous when you look at the measurements from the first video (1 tablespoon per jar.) Yikes! As soon as I tried them, I winced in salt-shock and I was still tasting salt in my mouth hours after I tested them. I should have just put the slices over my eyes and called it quits for the day. 

 Obviously, don't follow the brine proportions. But the other steps should be fairly true:

   Cut off the ends of each pickle: this step is supposed to make the finished product crunchier than if you had left them on

I made pickle spears by cutting the pickle in half length-wise, then cutting each section into more sections

I also made pickle chips by cutting slices off each pickle because it was too curly for me to cut into spears

A second look at my piles of cucumber spears and chips

Ingredients I used for the first batch of pickles: cucumbers, dill, cloves of garlic, and way too much salt.

Into each jar went at least one clove of garlic and some pieces of dill (sadly, I didn't have any fresh from the garden)

A Jar messily stuffed with cucumbers; overly-salted mixture has been poured on top.

The finished jars of pickled cucumbers. If you look closely at the two smaller jars, you will notice I added a bit of chile powder to the mix as well as the typical ingredients.

     To try and correct this, the next day, I dumped out the brine, and put in a new brine from the recipe seen on the blog, A Girls' Guide to Guns and Butter. It is most similar to Peter Young's video recipe for pickles, but the mixture is heated so that the salt is dissolved into the mixture instead of being poured on top. Other theories suggested I could have tried correcting this over-saltiness by adding sugar to the mixture. But it has been 7 days now (they were on the counter for 3.5) and they are still super salty. 

Oh well, I will try again if we get another bunch of pickling cucumbers.     

Update: I tried again, using the recipe from blog, A Girls' Guide to Guns and Butter and the brine tasted much less salty. Unfortunately, when I put them in the fridge, I forgot to change out the cloth lids I had on them and all the moisture was sucked out once they got in the fridge so the pickles became unsafe to eat. Oh well, third time's the charm, right?