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Pickles and ferments
All Containers›Shop by use case›Pickles and ferments›Making a batch›Selecting and washingShop all pickles and ferments →
Making a batch

Selecting and washing

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5
Four decisions before anything touches brine: the variety, the size, how long they have waited and whether the blossom end came off. Three of the four are settled before you start.

Pickling varieties, not slicing varieties

They are bred differently. A slicing cucumber has a thicker skin and a higher water content and it does not hold up in brine the way a pickling variety does. This is the easiest thing to get wrong when buying from a general produce supplier rather than a grower who knows what you are doing with them, and it is worth saying out loud when you order.

Size is a product decision

Size determines what you can make, not just how it looks. Gherkins, spears and whole dills are different products needing different cucumbers, and a crate of mixed sizes is a crate you will be sorting rather than packing. Specify the size when you buy, because a grower can pick to a size and nobody can un-grow one.

Use them fast

The published guidance is to use cucumbers quickly after harvest, and delay is named against both hollow and shriveled pickles. The clock in this craft starts in the field. A grower who picks in the morning and delivers the same day is solving a quality problem for you that no amount of process will solve afterwards, and that is worth paying for.

If they must wait, refrigerate them. Waiting warm is the worst case and it is the default in a busy season.

Wash, then trim

Scrub them, because soil carries organisms the brine should not have to deal with and because grit in a jar is a complaint. Then take a sixteenth of an inch off the blossom end of every one. That step has its own page and it is the one that decides whether the batch is still crisp in month four.

References

United States Department of Agriculture. Complete Guide to Home Canning, Guide 6: Preparing and Canning Fermented Foods and Pickled Vegetables. Revised 2015, National Center for Home Food Preservation. nchfp.uga.edu
National Center for Home Food Preservation. Pickling: General Information. nchfp.uga.edu
National Center for Home Food Preservation. Named-problem tables for fermented pickles and for pickled foods. nchfp.uga.edu
Written from federal regulation and published extension guidance, not from a laboratory. An acidified food is a federal category with a filed process behind it, and your state enforces it. Anything here is a starting point for a conversation with your state department of agriculture and a process authority, not a determination that you comply.