Pickles

A few weeks back we took on a culinary project of astounding proportions. We made pickles. From scratch. It was so much fun.



I had never been called to pickle anything before. In fact, I've never even liked pickles. But this experience changed me from a pickle-hater to a pickle-appreciator as only a homemade pickle can.



For inspiration we looked to our favorite fount of food geekery - Alton Brown. We own several DVDs of his episodes, including "American Pickle" which you can see an excerpt from here.



Now doesn't that make you want to run out and pickle something? And so we did. We were fortunate to have a bunch of CSA cucumbers on hand, and we only had to pick up a couple of spices, as most of the ingredients were already in our pantry. In fact the only challenge in the whole process was finding the jars. We eventually found some at the World Market, but if this all develops into a regular pickle thing I'm going to have find a better source for canning supplies.



We made both the Sours and Sweets from the video, using Alton Brown's recipes. The recipes are well written and having a process to watch made it all incredibly simple. Our two pickles jars are still happily marinating away in the fridge, though the pickle supply significantly reduced at this point. Dear husband is partial to the Sweets while I've developed a fondness for the Sours. It was a very successful project and I'm looking forward to trying other pickle procedures posthaste.