I love sweet pickles. Here is a step by step recipe on how to make them if you decide to grow cucumbers in your garden. (The birds and squirrels have not developed a taste for mine yet!)
On Day 1
Pick (or buy) 7 pounds of cucumbers. If you pick them and you don’t have a small scale to weigh food you can weigh them by weighing yourself and an empty pan on a scale. Then weigh yourself and the pan full of cucumbers to get the weight of the cucumbers. Our scale is not that accurate so we probably had an extra few pounds of cucumbers.
We washed the cucumbers first and gently scraped off the rough spikes that were on some of the cucumbers.
We then sliced off the very ends of the cucumbers and threw them away. You do not need to peel the cucumbers. We then sliced the cucumbers. This recipe calls for slicing them 1/4″ thick but we sliced them closer to 1/8″ thick because I like thinner pickles.
Put the sliced cucumbers into the following mixture:
2 gallons of water (32 cups)
2 cups of lime juice (16 fluid ounces)
We used:
30 cups of water
15 fluid ounces of lime juice
Because the lime juice we bought came in a 15 fluid ounce bottle.
Leave the sliced cucumbers in the lime water for 24 hours.
On Day 2
Then drain and rinse the cucumbers well with water.
Then cover the cucumbers with ice water and let them stand for 3 hours.
After that drain and cover the cucumbers with the following mixture:
2 quarts of vinegar (64 fluid ounces)
8 pounds of sugar (Approximately 18 cups)
1 tablespoon of salt
1 teaspoon of mixed pickle spice (might be hard to find this – we found it at Walmart Neighborhood Market and not at a few other places we looked)
1 teaspoon of whole cloves
We used two 4 pound bags of sugar. Each bag says it is “Approximately 9 cups”.
Stir the cucumbers and the mixture a bit. Then try to make sure the cucumbers are covered by the mixture. Let the cucumbers stand in this mixture all night. (We left them for about 15 hours.) We stirred them a time or two during that period but the recipe does not call for it.
On Day 3
Then scoop the cucumbers out of this mixture and place them in the jars you are going to store them in.
Boil this mixture for thirty minutes. (It takes awhile for it to start boiling, but once it starts really boiling, time it for 30 minutes.)
Finally, pour the hot mixture over the cucumbers. If you use plastic jars you should let the mixture cool a little bit. (We waited 5 or 10 minutes.) This recipe makes around 15 pints. You can distribute the cucumbers into more or less jars depending on whether you want to use every drop of the hot mixture. We threw away some of the mixture rather than using another jar or two and redistributing the cucumbers a bit more.
We made this recipe in plastic jars and will store them all in the refrigerator since they would not have had a good seal. I don’t know how well they will keep in glass jars outside of the refrigerator. You would want to make sure you get a good seal.
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Leave a Reply