Thursday, December 3, 2009

Pickles & Relish

In part two of this seasons preserving I will focus on the Pickles & Relish made this season. Again the ingredients were sourced locally due to my small garden not being about to produce in bulk for canning. All the canning below was done during the month of August when the cucumbers were bountiful.

Granny's Sweet Pickle Relish Recipe

This season I made a double batch of relish from a recipe shared @ Annie's Kitchen Garden. I changed the recipe a bit to make a 100% cucumber relish which is posted below. If you are looking for a cucumber, pepper, onion relish please click the link above for the original recipe.

8 cups finely chopped cucumber
1/4 cup pickling salt
3 1/2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon celery seed
1 tablespoon mustard seed
1 tablespoon turmeric
2 cups cider vinegar

Use large slicing cucumbers and about 20 to get the full 8 cups. Clean the cucumbers well, slice into quarters and scope out all seeds. The skin was left on to color the relish green.

Grind or chop cucumbers into in a large bowl; sprinkle with salt and cover with cold water, I used a couple trays of ice as well.

Let stand 2 hours. Drain; rinse and drain thoroughly

Combine sugar, spices and vinegar in a large saucepot. Bring to a boil. Add drained vegetables; Return to boil and simmer 10 minutes.

Pack hot relish into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch head space. Remove air bubbles. Adjust two-piece caps. Process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath.

Baby Dill Pickle Recipe

7 liter(7 quart) basket of baby cucumbers
4 cups white vinegar
8 1/2 cups water
3/4 cup pickling salt
14 large cloves of garlic, chopped
14 dill flowers

Scrupulously clean the baby cucumbers, I do this in the sink with a little dish soap and a brush. Then rinsed well a few times.

Add the vinegar, water & salt into a large pot and bring to the boil.

Well the solution is coming to the boil start packing hot sterilized jars with the baby cucumbers make sure each jar also gets two heads of dill and two cloves of chopped garlic.

Now top up the jars with the hot vinegar solution leavening 1/4" head space, tighten the two piece lid on and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Pickles are at their best after the have been shelved for about a month and will keep for years in a dry dark place.

Bread & Butter Pickle Recipe

After making the baby dills I had enough cucumbers left for two more jars. I decided to cut them length wise and make Bread & Butter pickles. The recipe is coming for these, it was out of a library book that I will need to borrow again for the recipe. They turned out really well so the recipe is a keeper. They have a good balance of sweet and sour as well as a nice spice level.

7 comments:

  1. Dan - I made the same pickle relish, and didn't like it much. It was alot of work, and the taste was off.

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  2. Looking forward to trying some of this next year!

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  3. Dan ,Great recipes . Your hard work has made a pantry filled with lots of your garden treasure.Has to be so satisfying.

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  4. Isn't it lovely to have stores against the winter?

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  5. Have you opened and tried any of the baby dills yet? The recipe sounds like it might be quite good but I am interested to hear how it ended up tasting (texture and taste) before I snag your recipe for later use!

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  6. I made pickles too sweet and spicy dills. Most of them were made as as refrigerator pickles but I did do a few canned. I haven't opened them yet because I'm still working on eating the refrigerator ones.

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  7. these recipes turned out great this year. The dills were so much better this year. I loved the relish....

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