Make the CRISPEST, CRUNCHIEST Canned Pickles EVER! (Use THIS Method)

if you love crispy crunchy pickles even after they've sat on the shelf in your pantry for a year then you are absolutely going to want to watch this video i'm carolyn from homesteading family and i tried five different pickling methods and found the absolute best method for home canning pickles i'm gonna show it to you today [Music] if you've ever tried canning pickles then you're probably already familiar with most of the common tips things like working really fresh with really fresh cucumbers keeping everything nice and cold maybe adding some tannins like some horseradish leaf or grape leaf and cutting off the blossom end of your cucumbers before you pickle them all of these tips are really good and they're actually really important useful tips but they won't make really crispy crunchy pickles all by themselves last year i set out to find the best method for making crispy crunchy canned pickles that can sit on my shelf so i tried five different methods let's go check them out so it's important to know that every single one of these methods are approved methods so these are all safe pickles even though there's five different methods first of all i tried my old standard kosher dill and these have a wonderful flavor now these are just a quick pickle they haven't been brined or anything like that i just love their flavor they're nice and dilly after a year you can see they are not very crisp there's a little crunch to them but not very much and then i tried a long fermented pickle now this has just been fermented and then canned so this does not have any vinegar in it and let me tell you well they're a little bit crisper but they don't even smell good i don't even want to put this in my mouth it does not smell like vinegar it doesn't smell sour even with the dill in it the dill just kind of got a strange smell to it and they kind of went a little bit gray from the fermenting i'm not crazy about this i love fresh fermented pickles but not after they've been canned then i tried fermenting these pickles and then soaking them in fresh water for two days changing it out and then pickling them canning them in a regular vinegar pickle brine now not very crispy but the flavor is a little bit better i don't know it's not great i'm not crazy about them and they're definitely not crispy enough to keep using these then i tried a long brine now i've got to say i think these are very very nice crisp pickles look at that they actually crisp up pretty well and the flavor is pretty good i don't think it's awesome but it's actually pretty tasty and there's a bit of crispness after a year of sitting on the pantry shelf those are actually pretty good then i tried a brand new method of canning pickles and after a year look at that you could actually hear that thing crunch i am so impressed with this i mean can you hear the crunchiness of that and the flavor is great it's sour it is spicy this is my new official favorite pickle [Music] making pickles at home is such a fun thing to do and it's so great to have great pickles just sitting on your shelf for when you need them but you do need to follow some uh techniques in order to make sure that you end up with great quality pickles now as soon as you bring these pickles in from the garden or from the farmer's market you're gonna want to get them into a salt water brine and get their blossom ends cut off now it's okay if you're not ready to make pickles because they can sit in your brine cold like in the refrigerator for up to about seven days and you can even keep adding to it if you want so right now i'm gonna cut off the blossom ends so you have the stem end the part where the plant the cucumber was attached to the plant and you have the blossom end you want to remove a little bit of this blossom in to remove the enzyme that was in the blossom you do that by just slicing off a small slice of the blossom end now that's all we need to do for these right now we're just going to set them in to a bowl until we're ready to take the next step now make sure if you find any that have some not great spots or soft mushy parts that you set those aside to use for fresh eating or for relish or something chopped you only want really good strong healthy firm cucumbers for this to make the best pickles now we're looking for about eight pounds of these pickling cucumbers and that's important too make sure that you only use a actual pickling variety of cucumber you don't want to use your regular fresh eating varieties they just won't give you the best ones and try to use the smaller ones you don't want them to be too big i am going to finish this up in just a moment and we're gonna make our brine now here i have one quart of warm water and i have three quarters cups of salt just a good quality salt is fine today i'm using a redmond real salt and mix this up all the way until it's all the way dissolved now we would never want to put our cucumbers into warm water so we're just going to use this little bit of warm water to dissolve the salt and then we're going to add in really really cold water up to the two gallon line now once we have that made we're going to want to put our p our cucumbers into a large container something that will hold all eight pounds of cucumbers and two gallons of this brine pour the brine over the cucumbers and then put it all in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours now you can get away with up to seven days like i was saying and you can keep adding to it if you don't have the eight pounds yet but you want them to be in the refrigerator and you want to make sure to weigh down your cucumbers so that they're always underneath the brine level now i'm going to get a little bit more cold water here here's a 5 gallon bucket that i brined yesterday it's been sitting in the refrigerator overnight with a plate keeping it down and these guys are all ready to go on to the next step now we're going to make our pickling brine we're going to take eight cups of water make sure it's a really good filtered water or distilled water six cups of a five percent vinegar now you can choose what kind of vinegar you want just make sure it's a five percent and that it's been pasteurized you don't want a raw apple cider vinegar here because that will continue to change percentage of acidity while it's in storage today i'm using a distilled white vinegar take a quarter cup of sugar half a cup of salt and any sort of really good quality salt will be fine a sea salt or something with no additional additives is great for this process and then we're going to want to take one tablespoon of pickling spices you can either make your own or you can buy pre-made pickling spices and they're just good dry spices and you want to tie that up into a small piece of cheese cloth or butter muslin or a piece of a clean old white cotton t-shirt tie it into a little ball so those spices aren't going to come out on you and then we're going to bring the entire thing up to a simmer stirring every so often to make sure that we're dissolving the salt and the sugar [Music] now that our brine is going we're going to have to work really quickly and if it comes to a boil long before we're ready to use it we'll have to turn it off in weight we don't want it to steam away i have eight pint jars all ready to go they're freshly washed and they're nice and warm the lids in the bands have also been freshly washed and i'm starting my canner right now i'm going to bring it up to about 140 degrees while i'm waiting today i'm using the electric canner and you're going to see why in a moment this makes this so much easier but i only want to get it warm right now so i'm just preheating it now make sure that you have a rack in the bottom of whatever canner you're using you can certainly use just your regular old canning pot or any stock pot as long as it has a rack on the bottom but using the electric canner is gonna make life a lot more simple for you okay so now we're gonna start filling our jars we're gonna drop one clove of garlic in the bottom of each of our eight jars and then we're gonna add one teaspoon of mustard seed to each of these jars and one teaspoon of dill this is good quality dill seed and oh it smells so good now if you had fresh dill you could put a few sprigs in each of these jars and that would be great but i don't have fresh dill in the garden yet now we want to get our cucumbers sliced and into our jar so we want to make sure that we don't exceed our head space so we want to check and see how deep we can get these in here today i want spears but you can slice these if you want you could even leave them whole if they're smaller so i'm just going to quarter them the wrong way and start setting them into my jar i want to pack as many in as i possibly can okay now our brine has come to a full boil and as soon as it did i just went ahead and turned it off and we have all of our jars just ready and our pot is sitting right at 140 degrees so we actually timed that just right i am going to go ahead and fill up each of these jars with this hot hot brine right up to a half inch of the top of the jar now the method that we're going to be using to can today is called the low temperature pasteurization method and what that means is that when we get these jars lidded and into the canner we're not actually going to be bringing them to a full boil like you do with normal canning now this is an approved method that is only safe for certain recipes of pickles and because your jars never come to that full boil your cucumbers do not cook nearly as much as they do in traditional canned pickles this is great for keeping them crispy but you do have to know a few things about how to use this method properly one of them is that you have to have a good working thermometer a candy thermometer is fine i love my cheese making and dairy thermometer here with this nice long stem it works really well but you'll want to make sure that it's properly reading temperature and that it's calibrated make sure you run a plastic or a wooden item down the side just to make sure that you don't have any bubbles hiding in there between your pickles wipe your rim really well and put your flats on and tighten down just finger tight with your rings always working quickly so that everything stays nice and hot now that canner is right up to 140 degrees which is just how i want it i only have it a few inches filled with water and of course that rock rack is right on the bottom so i'm just going to settle these jars right on in and then i'll adjust the [Music] level so i have all of the jars in here but they need to be covered with one to two inches of hot water so i'm going to go ahead and add hot hot water right onto the top here just to get to one to two inches there we go now because we're using this low temperature pasteurization we are dependent completely on our thermometer which means that you don't need to make any adjustments for elevation you also don't need to put your lid on but you do need to get that good thermometer right in place and bring your pot up to 180 degrees now the real trick of this process is that we have to hold this pot at between 180 and 185 degrees fahrenheit for a full 30 minutes if you're on a stove top that can be a little bit tricky so you can see why i like the electric canner for this particular thing right now i've cooled off to about 130 degrees so i'm going to go ahead and pick it right on up to 180 and then we're gonna hold there for 30 minutes now these have been in the canner at 180 degrees fahrenheit for a full 30 minutes so we're ready to go ahead and pull them out now and set them down on a towel to cool all the way for 12 to 16 hours and then check to make sure that they're well sealed before labeling them and putting away make sure they sit for at least two weeks to fully pickle before you start eating them hey if you like pickles check out this video here on making an amazing ginger carrot ferment so good so amazing and you guys enjoy the best christmas pickles ever

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 160,360

Rating: 4.9535041 out of 5

Keywords: Homesteading Family, Food Preservation, how to make pickles, dill pickles, how to pickle, crunchy pickles, canning dill pickles, dill pickle recipe, homemade pickles, dill pickle brine, how to can, crunchy dill pickles, garlic dill pickles, canning pickles, how to make pickles with cucumbers, how to make pickles from cucumbers, how to make pickles at home, how to can pickles, how to make pickles out of cucumbers, how to make pickles with vinegar

Id: 7dlBiTeVdXE

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021