Cornichons and Gherkins

This morning, I made Sweet Gherkins using the recipe on page 306 of Preserving Summer's Bounty. It called for honey, which might just be the first time I've ever canned anything with honey in it. Basically, after soaking the little cucumbers overnight in ice water, I cooked them in a mixture of cider vinegar, turmeric, pickling spices, cinnamon and celery seeds. To this mixture, 2 cups of honey are added. That's a lot of honey. I used up the local honey I'd bought for the bees and then added in some more *gasp* store-bought organic honey. The recipe says it makes 10-11 pints, but I only got 4 and a half, so I don't know what's going on there.

Then, after the other cucumbers had sat in salt for a day, they were ready to become cornichons. This recipe comes from page 90 of The Joy of Pickling. These cornichons are pickled but not canned. After rinsing and drying the cucumbers, they are packed into a quart jar with 4 shallots, 2 dried chilies, 1 bay leaf, 10 peppercorns, and 2 sprigs of fresh tarragon. Then the jar is filled with white wine vinegar. I finished my bottle of white wine vinegar so had to top off the jar with some tarragon vinegar instead. Now it sits on the shelf for a month before eating them. With paté.

Little Tiny

We went down to visit my parents today, so we stopped by the farm near their place which has pickling cukes and peaches in their respective seasons. I was lucky enough to snag the last peck of teeny tiny cucumbers, the ones that are 1-2 inches long, for canning. I hadn't been planning on doing this today, so I wasn't entirely prepared, but I had enough to get started.

I have set aside 1.25 pounds of the very smallest (yes, I sorted the whole peck) to make cornichons. They are currently salted and resting for a day. They will be ready to work with around 5 pm tomorrow. I had a few cucumbers from the farm share and I added the largest of this new bag of cukes to make a half-batch of bread and butter pickles; these were sliced along with one onion and 1.5 heads of spring garlic and mixed with salt and ice and sat for 2.5 hours while we had dinner. 2 quarts were put into a jar with garlic, dill seed, a chili pepper, and brine and they will ferment into half-sours. There is also a batch of "Favorite Dill Pickles" (see below) and the rest will be made into gherkins; which are currently sitting with ice water in the fridge. Tomorrow I'll finish those up.

Before dinner, I made the batch of dill pickles - using the recipe on page 133 of The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving. These have garlic, dill seeds, mustard seeds, and a little sugar in addition to the vinegar-water-salt brine. The recipe made 6 pints, not 4, as I left the cukes whole. I had to make an extra half-batch of the brine in order to fill the jars. Two jars have been set aside for the fair, as long as they taste good when we open them up.

After dinner, I finished the bread and butter pickles: using the recipe on page 95 in The Joy of Pickling, but cut in half, the only other change was using the spring garlic. I hope it isn't too overwhelming to have the garlic flavor but I thought it'd be nice. Half a batch makes 4 pints.

That should be plenty of cucumber pickles for this season!