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Dill Pickles – Raw Lacto-Fermented

October 7th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Recipe for Pickling Cucumbers:

4-5 pickling cucumbers quartered
1 tablespoon salt (not iodized anti-caking)
1 cup non-chlorinated water
2 tablespoons fresh dill
1 tablespoon of mustard seeds
4 garlic cloves
tiny onions or pieces (optional)

Tightly pack  the quartered cucumbers into a quart mason jar.  You want to be sure the cucumbers stay submerged in the brine, so squeeze as many as you can into the jar.

Make the brine by mixing the water, salt, mustard seeds and dill together, making sure the salt is dissolved.

Pour the brine over the cucumbers.

Wedge the garlic cloves (and optional onions) into the pickles so they will stay submerged too.

Add additional water as needed to cover the cucumbers by 1/2 inch, leaving 1 inch of air at the top.

Put a lid on the pickles.  The lid should be tight, but still allow a tiny amount of CO2 to escape.

Cover the jar with a cloth to keep the light out

Leave the jar in a warm but not hot location for 2 days.  If you used whole pickles rather than quartered, let them sit out for 3 days.  Don’t open the jar during this incubation process.  Just leave it alone and let it do it’s fermentation thing.

Your pickles are now ready for cold storage.  You can eat them now, or let them continue to ferment in the refrigerator and become more sour. These pickles will easily last until the next cucumber season.  The longer they are stored the more sour they will become.

Don’t try to reuse the brine to make more pickles, because it won’t work.  Lacto-fermentation is a process.   The early microorganisms start the fermentation and then others take over in the later phases.  So the used brine will not be correct for the starter organisms. Try it. Put a few cucumber spears in the used brine.  You will see that the cucumbers will become mushy and will eventually smell bad–don’t eat them. Lacto-fermenting is also called pickling. When salt and water is used, it is sometimes called brine pickling.

Be generous with the salt, it is necessary to start the fermentation process.  Also, use a nice salt, not one that has fillers and anti-caking chemicals.

Yummy homemade probiotics.

Pickle problems and solutions

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