Friday, August 31, 2007

Not-so-easy dill pickles!

If only they tasted as good as they look!
About 6 weeks ago Rachael and I decided to give canning dill pickles a try. We had ample amount of cucumbers from the farm, so we gave it our best effort. We were quite proud of ourselves when it was all done. I did not have a blog at the time or I would have blogged about it, but Rachael blogged about it, even put our recipe on the blog. If only she knew then what she knows now, she wouldn't have done that! I hope nobody actually took our recipe and used it. It definitely needs some tweaking. I found the recipe online at work, and a coworker suggested we use apple cider vinegar instead of the white vinegar the recipe called for. She seemed like an experienced canner so I figured I should trust her. Turns out she was wrong, even though she still swears that's what she always uses.


After a couple weeks we opened a jar to try the pickles and sadly we were not impressed, they tasted a lot like apple cider vinegar and not much like dill and garlic. This was very disappointing seeing as we had canned 40 quarts! But we decided to give it more time, apparently you are supposed to let them sit for 6 weeks before eating. The other night at work I was talking about the pickles and telling the lady who suggested the vinegar change that I thought that was a mistake and she suggested I bring in a jar and let everyone try them and decide if they are any good, now that it's been 6 weeks. The verdict: Not that bad, can still taste the cider vinegar but not nearly as much and we didn't use enough dill and garlic so there isn't a strong flavor to them. But they are crispy! I don't think I'll have to throw them out, but they're certainly nothing to brag about. And next year we will probably try again, but will use white vinegar and add a lot more garlic and dill. Actually I think I will steal my brother-in-laws recipe, he made sun dill pickles and they turned out awesome.

5 comments:

redmaryjanes said...

I think you should pat yourselves on the back for doing ok on the first try. Next years will be great. I live in West MI, you guys aren't too far from me.

MoscowMom said...

Hi, again!
I tried to find my other comment to you, but couldn't. Here's the translation of what my student said: "In september you very VERY small. Now you very VERY big. How in september (meaning the following september, when the baby was due) the baby not in you?" me: "Drugs! Many good drugs!" It was much cuter in Spanish, since she was struggling to overcome not knowing the past and future tenses in asking me that...

We live in the land of pickles here--you can even get offered them at breakfast--but I sure miss American sweet pickles!!! Good luck with your next batch :-)

Denise said...

Hey Lori-
Thanks for the advice... any idea if I'm able to change my blog address without having to delete the blog and start over? I would like to get rid of "thebrinksters" since it too is identifying. Hope you don't mind me asking your advice... you seem like you got the hang of the blogging thing.

redmaryjanes said...

Lori,
I scour the internet for all of my graphics. I was a total addict for a while there and have thousands of pictures stored up in files. It's what I do at night after the kids are in bed and I get a little quiet time and coke zero. Feel free to take anything off of my blog that you like.

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