For Those Of You Who Asked . . .

I've had two requests, one from Laurie and one from Susan, for my dill pickle recipe, so here goes.

They're super simple (once you stretch every muscle you have planting, watering, weeding, harvesting the cukes, scrubbing all those little black prickles off the pickling cukes, hauling your jars out of storage and washing, checking to make sure you have enough rings and lids, getting your canner down from the top pantry shelf, and . . . oh, never mind) and they have always turned out great for me.

The name, Easy Boom-Boom Dills, is kinda silly and does have a story behind it, but it's not very interesting so I'll just stop rambling and set forth the recipe.  

Here goes.  (I think I said that before.)

Easy Boom-Boom Dill Pickles

In each sterlized quart jar, place a fresh dill head and a peeled garlic clove in both the bottom and then in the top.  In between, pack in as many pickling cukes (about a 3"-3-1/2" size is best) as you can.

If you pack the cukes in tightly,

none will float to the

top of the jar during canning.

Fill the jar to 1/4" of the top with a (hot) brine made up of 9 cups of water, 3 cups of apple cider vinegar and 6 tablespoons salt which has been combined and brought to a boil.  Adjust caps and process in a boiling water bath 15 minutes for quarts, 10 minutes for pints.

Seven pounds of pickling cucumbers and the above amount of brine comes really close to making exactly 7 quarts.  If I have any brine left over, I store it covered in the refrigerator and use it with my next batch.

These dill pickles come out nice and crisp and we've been happy with them for years.  And years.  A long time.

I think the secret of them being crisp is to plant and grow actual pickling cucumbers rather than using slicing cucumbers.  Also, plan to get the cukes from garden to canning jar as quickly as possible.  If you have to accumulate a couple of day's pickings to have enough for a batch, be sure to refrigerate them until use.  Or cut the cucumbers and brine recipe in half.  No problem there.

Once I read that cutting off the blossom end of your cucumbers would make for crisper pickles so I did that (what a lot of extra work), but we couldn't tell any difference.  But, as I say, these dills have always turned out crispy-crunchy for me anyway.

Some time I'm going to add more garlic to make Garlic Dills.  Or how about a hot pepper?  One year I didn't have any fresh dill so I used dill seed and that worked okay.  But fresh dill has such a good flavor that I grow plenty of it just for the dill pickles.

Any question, class?  Feel free to "raise your hand" in the comment section if I've missed anything, okay?