We’ve been getting cucumbers nearly every week in our CSA shares, and, while we can eat some of them as toppings for sandwiches, or even as cucumber slices, or a cucumber salad, sometimes we want them turned into pickles. No, not the kind for which you have to slave away in the kitchen, the kind that takes 10 minutes. Really!
You’ve seen us make bread-and-butter Super-Easy Pickles in the microwave, you’ve seen the Old-Fashioned Maine Mustard Pickles, but we’ve not tried a quick and easy dill pickle. This post remedies that. We base it on the instructions we found on Wikihow.
Easy Dill Pickles
Ingredients
- 3 medium cucumbers quartered
- 1/2 cup white vinegar
- 2 cups water
- 2 tsp dill seed
- 2 tsp dried dill
- 1 tsp garlic
- 3/4 Tbs kosher salt
Instructions
- Place the cucumbers in a heatproof container.
- Bring the remaining ingredients to a boil over high heat.
- Pour the liquid over cucumbers.
- Let cool, then cover and store in the refrigerator for 3 days before eating.
Ingredient discussion:
We don’t get fresh dill now in our CSA, or we’d have used several dill fronds in place of the dried dill. For the vinegar, just use plain old white vinegar; it’s adding acidity, not flavor, so you can just use the cheapest. We recommend tasting a slice of cucumber before you start, and, if the peel is bitter, peel the cukes before using. And they don’t have to be quartered; it’s just that wedges look nice.
Procedure in detail:
There’s really not much to this, but we’ll try to pad out this post a bit.
Prepare cukes. Place cucumber wedges in a non-reactive heatproof container. We have a nice refrigerator box with a lid that we’ve used. A quart mason jar would also work. Or in a pinch, even a bowl. You probably want to use something glass, as the acidic vinegar may transfer odors and flavors.
Boil brine. Measure the remaining ingredients into a small saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. In reality, this only helps to hydrate the dried herbs, dissolve the salt, and help the flavors penetrate the cukes faster.
Cover cukes with brine. Pour the boiling brine over the cucumber slices. If they’re not quite submerged, quickly make up a little more brine and add it. Let the cukes cool a bit, cover, and refrigerate.
Pickle. Give these a few days for the flavors to penetrate and the cucumbers to pickle. You can try them early; they won’t be as flavorful, but they’ll still be good.
See, ten minutes to make pickles. Well, ten minutes of your time; the pickles do have to sit for a while. We will say that these are not as good as fermented pickles, but, for the amount of effort, they can’t be beat. We might try changing the flavors just a bit next time, adding a bit of dried chili, maybe a bit more garlic. Eventually, these will be our dill pickles. Imagine seeing ScratchinIt Pickles on your local grocers shelf. Nah, we’d rather you had the fun making your pickles, too. Four stars.