Hi I'm Wendy Van Wagner and I'm Joe Meade and you're with us here at "In The Kitchen"
cooking school
where we will be making and canning dill pickles today.
To make the pickles you'll need four pounds pickling cucumbers,
six heads of fresh dill,
three-and-a-half tablespoons non-iodized kosher salt,
three cups five percent white vinegar,
three cups of de-chlorinated soft water,
one-and-a-half tablespoons of yellow mustard seeds, six cloves of white skin
garlic, and six bay leaves. You want to wash all
your utensils and jars. USDA does say though that if your going to be
processing for more than ten minutes you'll just need clean jars you won't
need to uh... pre-sterilize them.
If you have a dishwasher and your doing a bunch of jars at one time you can
also run it through your sanitizer rinse.
Make sure to inspect your jars,
so I like to go around the inside
and around the top just feel for any chips or irregularities to make sure
that its safe to use.
You want to make sure that the rubber
sealing rings are soft and flexible so that you get a good seal, also inspect
the lid for any chips or cracks. When making pickles it's an important part of food
safety to use a tested recipe
and not deviate from the ratios given in the recipe.
It's important to use a five percent
vinegar or fifty grain vinegar
be sure not to use a homemade vinegar or something where you're not sure of the
acidity
as that may make you pickles unsafe to eat.
Make sure you use the freshest
pickling cucumbers you can find,
slicing style or burpless cucumbers do not make good pickles.
You wanna select young even slightly immature cucumbers.
You want them to be thin skinned and about
four inches long. To prepare your cucumbers wash them thoroughly no matter where you got
them and slice off the blossom end
and leave about a quarter inch of stem.
For the brine we need three cups water,
three cups vinegar,
three and a half tablespoons of salt,
and one and a half tablespoons yellow mustard seeds.
So I'm bringing my brine to a boil and I'm also stirring it a little bit to
make sure that all of the salt dissolves.
Add a dill head,
a bay leaf,
and a peeled garlic clove to each jar. If you want you can also add a pinch of
pickling spice.
If you hold the jar at a little bit of an angle
it will allow you to fill the jar completely up.
Now it's time to add the hot brine, leave half an inch of head space,
that's the area from the lid to the top of the liquid,
and so I'm taking a plastic spactula
just something pretty thin that you can fit between the pickles and the jar
and I'm releasing any air bubbles and you want to go around and do that to each jar.
Okay so we're all ready to seal up our jars but before you do that you
want to take a towel, a clean towel
and wipe the rim of each jar and you wanna get on the inside too.
So were going to add our lids and rings
to the jar.
For extra tall jars like these beautiful asparagus jars
I'm going to go ahead and just use a
large stock pot that I have,
I'm going to add hot water
cause you wanna make sure that there's two inches of
water above your jars, you want to put up
a steamer rack or something in the bottom
just to protect your jars while they're in the water bath.
Once the water in your water bath comes to a boil that's when your
canning time starts. This recipe calls for thirty minutes.
When the processing time is completed turn the flame off but allow the jars
to sit in the hot water for at least another five minutes.
Remove the jars
from the hot water
and place them on a cooling rack, a towel
or onto a wooden cutting board,
and allow them to cool completely.
And even after they're cooled,
you want on leave them undisturbed overnight
so that the seal really has a chance to take hold.
So once the jars cooled you want to remove the metal clips
and you can test the seal by gently placing your fingers on the edge and
pulling up, if you
don't get any resistance then obviously it hasn't sealed and if
that's the case stick those in your fridge and enjoy these pickles first .
Now all you need to let them do is rest for two to three weeks before enjoying them.
Thanks for joining us again in the kitchen.
So get out there
grow some cucumbers, can some pickles
and grow organic for life.