Fresh water dills

One of the things some of us look forward to is the beginning of the harvest and the influx of food that is alive with all the Mother Nature can pack into her delicacies. Although I enjoy a sour dill pickle now and again, it's the ones I brew up on the counter in the ancient ways, that I develop a deep lust for.

I'm all about the senses! :D



Pierrette puts by over 50 litres of sour dills most years and inevitably there are cucumbers she misses picking and they get too large to pickle. Given that she's making ten quarts of pickles every two days, there are plenty of cucumbers to go around for table use, and even chicken feed! I finally found a great use for the ones that get a bit too big to pickle in the usual way.

Fresh water dills can kill off a lot of these big ones. The beauty of them is that at least in the early stages, they serve up more like a vegetable than a harsh sour pickle. I can eat a lot more of them than I can ever stomach of the sour pickles and over the years have come to prefer the freshwater versions of the dill pickle. They are dead easy to make, which is always a hit with me.

Here's how I learnt to do it.

- Wash a jar and rinse it well.

- Wash the cucumbers, scrubbing the spines off them as well as the dirt.

- Poke the cukes several times with a fork to help speed up the mingling of the brine and fruit juices.

- Peel and halve some garlic, or not. I used 5 gloves for this batch and put them at the bottom of the jar.

- Collect and put a handful of dill weed in the jar bottom. As much or as little as you like, I think. I would guess that a cup or two of loosely packed sprigs went into this batch. I suspect the flowering heads give an odd flavour so I've avoided them this time.

- Add 15-20ml (A table spoon to a table spoon and a teaspoon) of pickling salt per litre of container size. I disolve this in good clean water ahead and add that after I've packed the jar full of cucumbers.

- Pack the jar, chucky jambed full of fork stabbed cucumbers so that none float. You want all the fruit below the level of the water.

- Fill the jar with good clean potable water so that all the fruit is submerged. I cover the mouth of the jar with some kind of plastic cling wrap and then poke a hole in the wrap with a fork.

Do not seal the jar! It will explode

Set the jar aside on the kitchen counter to ferment and watch as the bubbles start to rise in a couple of days. The water will go cloudy and after a week on the counter find some space in the fridge to slow the process down some. I can never wait much more than a week to begin sampling the bounty, but the process isn't usually complete and through the entirety of the larger fruit for a couple of weeks. We'll be finished our first jar before that time though, I'm sure. ;^)

One of the great gifts of summer.
Cheers!