Eric Rochow: Hey, how are you doing? Welcome to Gardenfork. Today, I’ve thought we try and make something that I really, really like; and I was thought it was really complicated and I don’t think it is. We have a bunch of cucumbers and it’s the end of the year here so I want to use them all up and I thought let’s try and make Bread and Butter Pickles because I really like Bread and Butter Pickles. Hey. But I usually just buy them at the store and I thought like, I’ve got all this canning stuff now when I went on the web and it’s really easy, it’s basically some vinegar, some sugar, some pickle and spices, onion and cucumber. So, you know I think maybe you are supposed to have special pickle in kind of cucumbers, but these are just regular table ones and we’re going use them and see what happens.
So we can pick some cucumbers, play the dogs a little bit and go inside and cook this up, it shouldn’t take too long, couple of these. So we got these peppers, I’m going to put some of these peppers in with the pickles as well I think, with the cucumber, I think that would be fun. Okay, so this is really quite simple. The first thing you have do is you have to slice up your cucumbers and you’re going to salt them and put them in a colander over a bowl and let them drain. Really simple, we are going to have to take our cucumbers and slice them up, you just slice them to however thick you like and I like it a little thin, but you know add holder. And then we have salt these, now we’re going to salt them to get some of the liquid out of them. Let the salt sit for an hour or so, and then we’ll proceed so, get your colander, put that into your bowl, take these, slice them up. So here we are, we got so nicely sliced up, we’ll take all this, put this in a colander, so then we’ll take salt. I just use this kosher salt.
You can also -- I think there’s stuff called pickling salt, but you want to draw some of the moisture out of this and then you just -- and mix this. We are going to let this sit for an hour; in the mean time, just before you are getting ready to do this again, take your big pot, your canning pot, put it on the stove and start to heat it up because this thing takes fair amount of water, remember that, so like a half hour before you’re going to start this, start your water. Make sure you have your cans, your wash, sorry these are jars with brand new lids, you can also -- you can reuse the jars and buy new lids. I’ve just bought them at the store today. Alright, that’s it. Now we go play with the dogs. Okay, so we are back. This has been salted by the way I forget to take my glasses out of the way. I’ve also, -- I’ve put some onion in here and you salt the onion as well. So, you can just mix that all up then I’ll show you this is how much water came out of there, that’s quite a bit.
That’s basically, you don’t want a lot of water in your pickling juice solution, so this comes out, it goes in there. So, now we have to make the pickling solution, that’s really easy to do. You have -- I’ve two cups of cider vinegar, you can also use white vinegar. I’m curious to see how cider vinegar works with this, so I’m going to do that. So, that goes in the sauce pan and then I have three quarters of a cup of just white sugar and you can ramp up, if you are going to can a bunch -- pickle a bunch of stuff, you know obviously you can ramp up this recipe, but this is for a couple of jars, so I just want to do this. And then for spices, there is a bunch of stuff that you can put in there you know I have been on the web, there is all sorts of things and I’ll list some stuff on our website, but I found this at the IGA it’s called pickling spice and it looks like it has dill, by the way dill shooting today, dills that has pepper corns, bay leaves, I think it has mustard seeds in there and some other fun stuff.
So, we’re just going to take some of this and put it in there. And I think I’m going to take some of this and just drop it in each one as well. So we take our sugar and vinegar solutions with some of the pickling spice and just we’re – basically just going to heat it up and melt the sugar into the vinegar solution. It’s a little strong; so don’t like a little ride over and breath in. Meanwhile, you’ve got your big kettle of water here going, so we need to sterilize the jars and by the way my friend Charlie bought me these or may be Len bought these, these rubber coated tongs after watching me you know grab the things last time, so and that was fun. That fills the water, this is what I was talking about when you can reuse your jars, you can get just a little box of the new lids. So, this is a whole thing and new lids in there and you can reuse the jars and reuse the bands, that’s the part of the thread on them and works just great.
Alright. So, that’s just about all dissolved, so we’re going to take these out and drain them, don’t touch them they’re really hot. Alright, so now we’re going to do the fun part, I’m going to take a little bit of this pickling spice and just put a little bit in the bottom of each one. This is really cool; it’s just going to be a lot of fun I think. And then I peel some garlic, so I’ll put garlic in each one, I’ve never – you know I’ve never done this before so let’s see what happens. And now the cucumbers and the onions so I don’t know because it’s a scientific way, I’m just going to put it in. You know the ratio is up to you; I really like the sweet and savoriness of the onion. That looks great, doesn’t it? That’s going to be cool.
Oh! Man, I forgot. You are supposed to rinse off – rinse the salt off of this stuff, that’s fine. We’re supposed to rinse the salt off, before we put them in the jars, so. Sorry about that, rinse off the salt un-jar, un-can your stuff and rinse off that. Do you have comments Phil?
Phil: No comments.
Eric Rochow: Okay, alright. So, we’ve got these all kind of nicely packed, I remember to rinse them finally, you got your spices here, there is some garlic in there and just this little extra touch, I add some red pepper, these are like a frying pepper, I just going to put a little color in there, I think that’ll look kind of fun. And now, we pour the pickling solution, on them, this would be great, this would be really – this would be very neat. These are nicely filled up, you take your lids and you put them in a little sauce pan till they are just simmer, you want to just sterilize, you don’t want to boil them rapidly. I’m just going to do two of them right now to show you because we have a lot to do here. You just take these and put them on, make sure that the top here is clean. And then you take the band and you put it on there. It doesn’t have to be super tight; it just has to be that the lid – where the lid is going to touch the side of the jar has to be clean.
You take these and you put them in your can or your -- basically your giant pasta pan and you process these for ten minutes and then pull them out and let them cool, usually overnight and then you tap the lid and if it goes tum-tum, tum-tum, if it goes like that, that means that the seal didn’t take, you need to take the lid off, throw the lid out, clean the rear of the glass, put a new lid on, you can process it again or you could just heat those pickles. So, but this is easy, just put them in, close it off, let it boil for ten minutes, pull them out and then you are done. So that’s it.
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