Mild Fermented Pickles Recipe

If you don't like fermented foods because they're too tart or sour, you might like these pickles. There's no vinegar or sharp taste. Even the onions are mild. They're not sweet, either, even though the recipe calls for brown sugar: the bacteria consume most or all of the sugar. They're just mild, savory pickles.

There's no need to add culture because cucumbers naturally have L. plantarum bacteria on their surface.

Equipment needed

1 quart canning jar* with ring and lid (or fermenting lid)

1 fermentation weight or small, clean stones in a Ziploc baggie

Ingredients

1 pound pickling cucumbers** (not salad cucumbers), preferably unwashed

1/4 sweet onion (like Vidalia)

1 teaspoon juniper berries

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns

1/2 teaspoon anise seed

1 tablespoon brown sugar

3 tablespoons pickling salt or other salt without iodine

1/4 teaspoon pickle crisp

Filtered water free of chlorine

Instructions

Rinse the cucumbers in the filtered water just enough to get the dirt and spines off. Cut off and discard the ends and cut into 1/4" slices.

Cut the onion into thin slices. Cut the larger rings in half if desired.

Put the salt, sugar and spices in the jar along with a cup of water. Put the lid on tightly and shake well until the salt and sugar are dissolved.

Put the onion and cucumbers in the jar, alternating them so they are mixed. Fill the jar with filtered water, leaving about an inch of head space. Sprinkle in the pickle crisp.

Place the weight or bagged stones in the jar and put the ring and lid on loosely (or use a fermentation lid). Place the jar away from drafts and direct sunlight where it can ferment at about 70 degrees F. Let ferment for three days--the liquid will be cloudy and the pickles ready to eat. Refrigerate.

*Vintage crocks may contain lead.

** This year I started growing a variety called Pick-a-Bushel Hybrid, and I'm impressed. Burpee says, "2014 All-America Selections Regional Award Winner for Heartland and Great Lakes! A semi-bush variety that yields 10-20 white spined pickles per plant. Best harvested when 3-6" long Pick-a-Bushel is resistant to Cucumber Mosaic Virus, Scab, and MMV yielding bushels of bountiful harvest in any growing season." Even the cucumbers that get large are firm and not too seedy.

Comments

Black Friday Deals for Good Health

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate. Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com (25% off this week only) iHerb.com (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow...

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...

1972: Carole King, MAS*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...

Decongestant Ineffective; Vibration Plate Works

A common ingredient in many cold medicines has been shown so ineffective that the FDA recently proposed taking it off the market. The ingredient, phenylephrine, "failed to outperform placebo pills in patients with cold and allergy congestion," say researchers from the University of Florida. "The same researchers also challenged the drug's effectiveness in 2007, but the FDA allowed the products to remain on the market pending additional research," according to CNBC . Mostly placebos. Photo from Pixabay . I can attest that phenylephrine doesn't work. Before I stopped eating wheat, I constantly had nasal and sinus congestion. I helped keep Sudafed in business when the active ingredient was pseudoephedrine, but I noticed the PE (phenylephrine) variety didn't work at all. The only other decongestants I've found helpful are guaifenesin (Mucinex) and spicy food. Mucinex is expensive because it works! (The cheaper store brands work just as well, though.) Su...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog