Saturday, August 08, 2009

Pickling 2009

It seemed a little stunted early on but the garden is finally doing well. Though the pumpkins are getting huge and taking over, we had enough beans and cucumbers today do a pickling session this afternoon.

I got mixed reviews from the sweet pickles from last year so I thought I'd change it up a little this year. I think they came out just fine but it just seems that most the folks I know just prefer dill. This year, I decided to go the dill route. We purchased, from the OP Farmer's Market, fresh red garlic, dill, and hot peppers to complete the recipe. For the recipes, I found a couple online that looked good. The beans are brined with 2c each of water and white wine vinegar with 1/4c of salt, boiled. This is then poured over the beans, garlic, hot pepper, dill, and peppercorns that I jammed into a jar. The dill pickles were similar except I didn't use any pepper, used regular distilled vinegar, and put much more garlic and dill in the jars. All of the jars were processed for 12 minutes in boiling water. The afternoon's efforts yielded 8 jars of pickles and 4 jars of beans. Supposedly they will be ready in 6 weeks. I'll update you when the tasting begins.
A side note: I will be planting more beans and will also try peas next year. They have been the easiest crop and they taste great.

1 comment:

Julie said...

Our beans have finally taken off. Of course, we had to put a fence inside the fence to keep those evil rabbits out of them. I've been making the Pioneer Woman's beans all week. Brynn eats them like there is no tomorrow.