How to Make Bread-and-Butter Pickles

Make your own bread-and-butter pickles.

Perhaps you love the fresh crunch of a juicy pickle or you are wondering what to do with a bumper crop of cucumbers. Make your own bread-and-butter pickles at home and even store them safely in jars if you like, so you can enjoy them for months after summer's bounty has fled.

Things You'll Need

• 4 quarts pickling cucumbers
• 1 1/2 cups onions, sliced
• 2 large garlic cloves
• 1/3 cup pickling salt
• 2 quarts chopped ice
• Clean kitchen towel
• 3 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp. turmeric
• 1 1/2 tsp. celery seed
• 2 tbs. mustard seed
• 3 cups white vinegar
• Sterilized glass jars

Instructions

1. Select dark green cucumbers with lots of "warts" and stay away from the yellow or white cucumbers with little warts, as they will have overdeveloped seeds. You do not want seeds. Wash the cucumbers in cold water and slice them.

2. Place sliced cucumbers and sliced onions, garlic cloves and pickling salt in a large bowl and mix well. It takes about three or four cucumbers to fill a pint jar. Each cucumber is about 4 to 5 inches long, and you will cut off the ends so they will fit standard pint jars with 1/4 inch to spare.

3. Cover the cucumber mixture with chopped ice, place a kitchen towel over the bowl and let stand for three hours.

4. Prepare brine by combining sugar, turmeric, celery seed, mustard seed and vinegar in a large pot and bringing it to a boil.

5. Drain water and ice from the cucumber mixture and remove the garlic cloves, then add the cucumber mixture to the brine and simmer it for five minutes.

6. Pack the pickles in sterile jars that you have boiled and prepared beforehand. Leave about 1/2-inch space on top and then seal. If you are going to use the pickles within a few weeks, you can refrigerate them at this point, but if you want to store them for a longer period, you will have to process the jars in a water bath.

7. Process the pickle jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Once the jars are cool, you can check that they are sealed by verifying that the lid has been sucked down. Just press in the center, gently, with your finger. If it it pops up and down and makes a popping sound, it is not sealed.

Tips & Warnings

• You can purchase Quick Process Pickling mix at the store. It usually goes for about $2.00 to $4.00 per packet. A packet will make about a dozen pint jars.

• Pint canning jars (Ball or Kerr jars can be found at Publix and WalMart - about $8 per dozen jars including the lids and rings). Be sure to get wide mouth jars to fit the pickles in! Pint size works best!

References

• Simply Recipes; Bread and Butter Pickles; Elise; August 2008
• Pick Your Own; How to Make Bread-and-Butter Pickles, Naturally;
• Food; Bread and Butter Pickles; September 2003