Crisp Pickle Voodoo

To my mind, crisp dill pickles are the peak of excellence. The challenge is in maintaining the crispness of the product. Our quest for crisp dills took several years of experimentation and feels like ritual magic, but it works…usually. Here’s what we do:

1. Get the best cucumbers possible. If they are rubbery when you start, you can’t expect them to be crisp when they are done. It also seems like larger cucumbers get, the more likely they are to become soft as the seed cavity makes up a larger part of the flesh.
   
   


2. Trim off a small portion of the blossom end. Commercial studies in the 1950’s determined that a pectinolytic enzymes which cause softening were present in the blossom of the cucumber. If blossom material remained on the cucumber during brining the pickles would soften. This is apparently from yeast like fungus that lives on the blossom and can be present in the basal connection. Trimming the blossom end removes the possible enzyme containing portion of the cucumber. Does this enzyme remain active in raw pack pickles? I don’t know but, we’ve added the trimming of a small portion of the blossom end to our process. I think it also allows an easy entry point for the brine to enter the cucumber.
   
   


3. Chill the cucumbers. We fill a 70 qt. ice chest part way with ice and then enough water to cover the ice. The cucumbers are trimmed then submerged in the ice bath for several hours.
   
   


4. Pack the pickles and add a grape leaf on top. Folklore said that the grape leaf would keep the pickles crisp. It has been determined that tannins in the grape leaf actually counteract the pectinolytic enzymes, we talked about earlier. Since we are trying to eliminate the enzyme by cutting off the blossom end, this may be redundant, but we add it anyway.
   
   


5. Use an approved recipe and make sure your brine is properly acidic by using a proper vinegar. Process for the minimum time recommended by the recipe.

Generally we find that this gives us pretty crisp pickles. We’ve steered away from using agents like Alum, or food grade lime, as it just doesn’t sound appealing. We are planning to explore low temperature pasteurizing, using a recipe that processes at 180 degrees for 30 minutes. Keeping the temperature below 185 degrees maintains the pectin structure and further preserves crispness.

Pickle Day 2010

It seems only fitting to start this blog on eating great local food with one of our annual ventures- Binge Pickling. Yes, it started out innocently enough, putting up a few extra cucumbers for use later but it has become an annual obsession. To make it worse, we've corrupted many of our friends and relatives. "Go ahead, try it. Come on, don't be afraid, they won't hurt you" We've become pickle pushers and as a result have had to up our production to meet our needs and supply those who are now hooked.

Pickling day started off with a trip to the garden for onions (Walla Walla Sweet and Cipolini), shallots and the few peppers that were ripe this year. The next morning kicked off with a 7:00 AM trip to the Farmers Market for the cucumbers we needed. Searching high and low found 3 vendors among the masses with pickling cukes and we had out 40 pounds selected and bagged just as the bell rang to open the market. Stops by a few more popular stalls produced organic sweet bell peppers in red, orange and yellow as well as some sweet Italian red peppers with a little more punch. Three bunches of organic dill leaves and a couple bundles of dill seed heads and we were ready to roll.

We actually made two types of pickles, Dills which I'll touch on later - (stay tuned for "The Voodoo of Crisp Pickles".) The second type is a variation on Bread and Butters we created to match up with "Fire and Ice" pickles we originally had at a barbecue place.

These start out with the basic Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving Bread and Butter Pickle recipe. (This is kind of our basic bible for canning) During the salting and icing step, we add a sliced sweet bell peppers, some Hungarian, banana or what ever type of peppers are ripe. For fun we use a wavy edged knife to get the traditional wavy cut texture to the pickles. We use the larger cukes we had after sorting, Maybe 4" long and 1"-1.5" in diameter.

During the packing and brining stage, we add cayenne pepper and red pepper flakes to the brine and spices. This is really to taste, so spice them as you like them. We've also tried adding a little annanto powder (see your Hispanic grocer) to add a reddish hue to the brine. I'm not sure if it is worth the effort, but you can decide for yourself. To the right are the salted veggies before the ice is added. After standing for 1.5 hours, they are rinsed, drained and added to the boiling brine solution.

Below is a jar being packed, air bubbles removed and headspace checked. Below right is the finished (almost) product. They are now packed away in the pantry, soaking up spicy goodness that will warm you all over like a sunny August day.