Making Homemade Pickles - What Can Go Wrong?

Over the years I’ve written several GrowVeg articles about making pickles and relishes, usually by covering the basics. But there are many little details involved in making homemade pickles, which is where many people get tripped up. After reviewing your comments and questions, I have more work to do explaining the pickle maker’s art.

Whole Cucumber Pickle Problems

Many of the commenters to my article, Time to Make Homemade Pickles, were having trouble with what I call fresh pack whole dills, where whole clean cucumbers are packed into jars with dill, garlic and a vinegar brine and then processed in a water bath canner. Here are some of the things that went wrong.

Shrivelled cucumbers. One reader made 90 quarts (!) of dill pickles and the next day the cukes were as wrinkled as prunes. This can happen when the cucumbers take up strong vinegar too rapidly. Soaking well-scrubbed cucumbers in a solution of 2 tablespoons salt per quart of water overnight will prevent puckering, enhance crispness, and may kill some unwanted microbes hiding in the rinds. Don’t give up the ship! As the wrinkled pickles mellow in their sealed jars, they sometimes regain their nice curves.

Fizzy pickles. There are many heartbreaking stories of bubbling pickles, as in fizzing and movement of air bubbles inside the sealed jars. This is an early indicator of spoilage due to microorganisms, and affected jars should be tossed. They will pop their seals sooner or later anyway from accumulated gases.

Fizzy pickles are usually due to under-processing, which is an easy mistake to make with pickles made from whole cucumbers. Ten to fifteen minutes in a boiling water bath are not sufficient to kill microbes lurking in the middle of quart jars, but longer processing times can make the pickles too soft. With quarts of whole dills, the compromise is to turn down the heat and use a hot water bath (180°F/82°C) for 30 minutes instead of a boiling water bath (212°F/100°C) for half that time. This is the recommended standard procedure in all of the time-tested food preservation books in my collection.

Cloudiness that appears in the brine within a day after the pickles are canned is not uncommon, and usually occurs because of hard water or mineral residues from iodised or sea salt. As the minerals settle, a slight white residue may form on the bottom of the jars. This is not an emergency as long as the jars lids are firmly sealed and there is no active bubbling inside the jars. If you have hard or heavily chlorinated water, boil it and let it sit overnight before using it to make pickles, or use distilled water. Use plain salt with no added minerals for pickles. It can be regular table salt, which is easier to measure than chunky canning salt.

Troubleshooting Sliced Pickles

Many of the questions about sliced pickles had to do with salt. What if I forgot to add salt to the brine? What if the pickles taste too salty?

Pre-salting the pieces after they are cut is done to enhance flavour and texture. Because slices take up salt well, there is often no need to add salt to the vinegar brine. As cucumbers and other vegetables are cut, sprinkle on salt in layers, and then cover with a few ice cubes to keep the veggies cool. After three hours the ice will melt, and you can rinse the slices in cool water in a colander. Try rinsing twice, then taste to see if they are pleasantly salty. Now make pickles!

Some people want to make pickles without sugar, which is doable but may result in soft, overly-tart pickles. Even sour-tasting hamburger slices include some sugar to balance the tartness of the vinegar. You can use brown sugar or honey, but every great pickling brine includes a little sugar. The more sugar you use, the more you tilt toward semi-sweet bread and butter pickles, or even sweeter relishes and chutneys.

Floating pickles are a common worry, but it’s often a cosmetic problem caused by packing the pickles into the jar too loosely. To get a good pack, it helps to heat the vegetables and brine together just to a simmer, until the cucumbers start to change colour, before packing them into hot jars. Heating makes the pieces more pliable and easier to press into place with a table knife as you tease out air bubbles.

Radical Refrigerator Pickles

Reader responses to my article on making refrigerator and freezer pickles were not so much about problems as possibilities. Can you use rice vinegar? How about raw vinegar? Can the sugar be reduced? Yes, yes and yes! Refrigerator and freezer pickles are not canned, so the usual rules on food safety regarding acidity don’t apply. Any vinegar or sweetener will do as long as you get the flavor you want. Refrigerator and freezer pickles are so forgiving that they are perfect projects for first-time picklers.

Written by Barbara Pleasant, GrowVeg Contributing Editor and author of the award-winning book, Homegrown Pantry.