[Sca-cooks] OOP, safely preserving pickles

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I second the recommendation for the Ball Blue Book -- you can't go wrong
with it, also the suggestion to look at extension offices.

The Ball recipe for pickled beets is exactly the same as the one I got from
my great-grandmother, with two caveats from Great-Grandma Elizabeth: use
distilled water, and use distilled vinegar rather than cider. I've used
cider vinegar to make pickled beets and it doesn't noticeably affect the
taste, but depending on the chemistry of your water you might want to run
it through a filter first. If you want to use your tap water, I recommend
doing a test run first -- mix up a micro-batch of brine (same proportions
but smaller amounts) and let it sit at least overnight to see what happens,
before you go using it. The well water in our first apartment in NY
combined with the acid in the vinegar to make excitingly chunky bits in the
brine. The Blue Book says: soft water should be used for brine, if you have
hard water boil it for 15 minutes and let it sit undisturbed for 24 hours,
then skim the scum and ladle the water out carefully so as not to disturb
the sediment, then add a T of vinegar per gallon.

Really it's easier to just pick up a filter pitcher or some gallons of
filtered water and use that.

Generally you process pickles for something like 10 minutes in a water
bath, which isn't enough to make them mushy. Long-term storage is what
makes them mushy unless you're adding alum or lime (depending on the recipe.

I can also recommend using wide-mouth jars unless you have really teeny
hands because it's much easier to pack them nicely if you can get your hand
in there. Use brand-new jars if you're pressure canning. Used jars are
generally fine for water-bath canning, but I've had used jars explode in
the pressure canner twice now. And you can never have too many kitchen
towels on hand when you're canning.

Margaret fitzWilliam


On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 2:54 AM Rebecca Friedman <rebeccaanne3 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Is anyone an expert on pickling? I am trying to figure out how to safely
> make pickles, and would really appreciate either some advice or a pointer
> to a good source (or both). There seems to be a lot of conflicting
> information out there. The key questions I have had trouble finding answers
> to are: first, if you use a safe quantity of vinegar and properly sterilize
> your jars, do you also need to process them in a water bath and for how
> long (this seems likely to turn the vegetables to mush, so I would rather
> not do it if it's just a "in case you didn't sterilize the jars properly"
> precaution, since I know I'm fine on that). And second, what is the safe
> percentage of vinegar *to beets or cucumbers* - I've found multiple places
> telling me I need a 50:50 vinegar:water ratio*, but the acidity of the
> whole thing is going to be affected by the vinegar:vegetable ratio too, and
> I can't find numbers on that.
>
> Anyone know where I should be looking? I'd really rather have a more solid
> source than a google search for this.
>
> *Except in approved recipes. No sources for approved recipes are given.
>
> Thank you very much in advance,
> Rebecca da Firenze/Rebecca Friedman
>
> PS: Oh, and since I'm emailing anyway - anyone have any good recipes for
> pickled beets? Canned, not refrigerator pickles, that is.
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