Dill Pickles, The Easy Way?

I found some organic pickling cucumbers on sale this week. The general consensus in this house like dill spears. So instead of buying all new herbs and spices that goes in my pickling mix, I decided to give Mrs. Wages kosher dill pickles a try. After reading through the ingredients, I added mustard seeds, celery seeds, black peppercorns, and two heads of garlic as tweaks to make the pickles my own. It would take 9-11 lbs of cucumbers according to the recipe on the back of the package. I have a love/hate relationship with premade mixes as you can tell from my additional purchases. 

I cut the blossom ends off and cut the cucumbers into jar height lengths. I was using regular mouth pint jars. the extra lengths that I cut off didn't go to waste, but were cut into bite sized cubes in a jar to themselves. To help hold the cucumber to cut the ends and wedges, I was lazy and didn't grab my cutting board with the pins in it, I grabbed a regular cutting board and used the grooved side. I placed the cucumbers length- wise along that groove to keep the cucumber from moving while cutting the ends. I was able to cut along the groove for the first longer cut.  For the wedges, it was was just laying the flat halves on the board and cutting them in half again. I also soaked the wedges for four hours in ice and salt water brine.

Cutting the blossom end off the cucumbers is important because if you leave it on, your pickles won't stay crisp. Even if you soak them in Alum, Calcium Chloride (Pickle Crisp), use and oak tree worth of leaves or a whole grapevine full of leaves...if you leave the blossom end on the cucumber (any vegetable) your pickles will become wimpy limp within months of canning it. So do yourself a favor, cut at least 1/8" off the blossom end off. Will they be crisp forever? Nope. After about three years they will lose their crispness and by ten years, they'll still have great flavor, but the pickle will disintegrate into mush.  Ask me how I know this.

As I stirred the mixture to bring the brine up to a boil (per directions) I knew I was right in the items I decided to add to my jars. I didn't find any peppercorns, tiny and few mustard seeds, and no garlic, nor saw no dill weed nor seeds in the mixture. I added 5 peppercorns, large clove of smashed garlic, and 1/2 tsp mustard seeds and dill weed to each jar before adding my spears. I also only used 6 lbs of cucumbers. I only processed them for 10 minutes too. I ended up canning 12 pints of pickles (11 spears and 1 jar of chunks) with the last jar getting the last drop of brine. Eleven jars sealed and one did not. The unsealed jar went to the refrigerator to be eaten first.

So how do they taste? I dunno yet. I usually let them sit and pickle for 10 days to let the full flavors to develop before tasting them. So they are not a true Mrs Wages dill pickles, and not my grandmother's recipe either. I just hope they turn out well. In the meantime, I'll be making at least one more batch (a dozen) to last this family of four for a year. If it was only me, a dozen would do just me. Each jar only cost me 46 cents to make and that's including the gas for the stove.

This makes sense and cents.