Garlic Pickles

I am the biggest fan of pickles.  I love 'em!  They are so wonderful and spicy and salty and seriously, I could probably eat an entire jar of pickles in one sitting.  Of course, that means that I grow my own pickling cucumbers.  However, I'm very sad to report that this year, my cucumber plants got all dried out and weird, even when getting as much water as the rest of the garden.  The few cucumbers that I did get grew in an almost gourd-like shape, so they weren't really useable.

So, I cheated.

I went to the farmer's market.

I'm using a recipe from The Complete Book of Small Batch Canning, which calls for about three pounds of cucumbers, and I got just a bit over three pounds.  I also sliced them into spears.

I discovered pickling lime last year when making pickled jalapenos.  It helps keep the vegetables firm, so I decided to give it a try with the pickles this year.  I use Mrs. Wages Pickling Lime.  It's a difficult thing to find.  The only place near me that had it was WalMart, and I absolutely loathe WalMart.  I feel dirty just walking into the place, and when I bought the pickling lime, it was actually the first time I'd been in a WalMart in about ten years.  YUCK.  If you can find the pickling lime somewhere else, I highly recommend that you do so.  I actually bought several packages so that I wouldn't have to go back again.  Otherwise, my policy is that if you shop at WalMart, you then have to make a donation to a charity, like a food bank, since WalMart pays crap and destroys businesses. 

Anyway, I digress.  Pickling lime is a nightmare.  You have to be careful not to breathe in the powder, and anywhere that the drops of pickling lime water drops, you'll end up with a crusty white mess.  It also crusts on the glass bowls, so you need to absolutely SCRUB them when you're done.  It's not fun.  But, you'll theoretically end up with super crispy pickles.

The first step was to mix a 1/2 cup pickling lime with 1 gallon of water.  I then set the cucumbers to soak for about three hours.  (You can soak them anywhere between two hours and overnight - they were very firm at three hours, so I decided to pull them.)

The second step is to rinse the cucumbers three times (I transfer them between a sieve and a bowl, and let the water run over the bowl I'm transferring them from as I rinse them by handfuls).

After that, you soak the pickles in ice water for three hours.  I think you can probably soak them longer than that.  I actually took them out after three hours and put them in the fridge, since I didn't have a chance to can them on the same day that I was doing all of the prep work.

The next day, I made the vinegar mixture, added some onion, garlic, and dill to the jars, and then packed the jars with the cucumbers.  I processed them in the pressure cooker as directed.

When they were cooling, though, I noticed that some of the liquid had come out of the jars.  This is called siphoning, and it happens for a myriad of reasons: the jars are overfilled, over-tightened, under-tightened, if the rim over the jar isn't clean, if you process too long ...  Last time it happened, I hadn't tightened the jars enough, and I suspect that's what happened.  It's no big deal - they just get stored in the fridge instead of the pantry and have to be used sooner.  I had been planning on making a second batch after hitting the farmer's market today anyway, so I'll just be more careful!

UPDATE:  I just tried the pickles that I processed.  They were total mush - like they'd been thoroughly cooked.  The pickles that I made after this, the ones that I didn't process, are good.  I will never process pickles again!