Last weekend our local supermarket had a cart full of one-gallon glass sun-tea jars on sale - "two for $5.". This came at a perfect time because I'm getting lots of cucumbers now and my wife wouldn't let me use her sun tea jar for fermenting pickles (I asked her a couple of weeks ago). I can understand her not wanting to take a chance that our iced tea will taste like pickles from now on, so I bought two jars for myself.
Last winter I ordered a book, "The Joy of Pickling" by Linda Ziedrich, from Amazon. I've enjoyed learning more about pickling and now that we have garden veggies I'm really enjoying trying various recipes and procedures. Mostly I'm making pickles the way I always have, by adding a brine of vinegar, salt, and water - and either keeping them cold as "refrigerator pickles" or canning them at 180-185 degrees F. The book has just made my vinegar-pickling a little more scientific.
I'd never tried the REAL old way of making cucumber pickles, though, by fermenting them. It's a simple process like making sauerkraut. Take a bunch of small pickling cukes and wash them in cold water. Trim a little off both ends, because there's an enzyme in the blossom tip of cucumbers that makes them spoil. I put a layer of 20 clean grape leaves in the bottom of the jar (grape tannin keeps pickles crunchy) and packed small cukes in tightly to about 2" from the top. Put 20 more clean grape leaves on top, and on top of those I put a small inverted plastic cup that keeps the cucumbers pressed down under the brine when the lid is screwed down.
Mix up a solution of 3 tablespoons of pickling salt per quart of water and fill the jar with it. This makes a 5% salt brine, which is strong enough for canning the pickles if I want to, though I'll probably just put these in the refrigerator when they're done. After two to three weeks in a cool dark room these will be ready to eat - the longer they ferment the sourer (and softer) they'll get. The trick is to stop the fermentation by refrigerating or canning at just the right time.
The bacteria at work here is lactobacillus - the same one that sours milk and makes yogurt and sauerkraut by producing lactic acid. It's naturally present on the skins of cucumbers, and the salt brine environment allows "lacto" to thrive while preventing other microorganisms from growing. Healthy stuff - and in many places, especially eastern Europe, the pickle brine is enjoyed as much as the pickles. I agree.
These were started three days ago, and now CO2 bubbles are froming, the brine is turning a little cloudy, and it's smelling real, real good. I wish these tea-jars didn't have the little painted flowers so we could see better, but hey - they were $2.50 per jar.
Does anyone else here ferment their own pickles?
