Fermentation Atlas · Side
Full-Sour Dill Pickles
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, aromatics blooming from the first bite, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg small pickling cucumbers, 8-10 cm
- 2 litres water
- 70 g non-iodised salt (a 3.5 percent brine)
- 1 head of flowering dill, or 15 g dill seed
- 20 g garlic, sliced
- 5 g black peppercorns
- 5 g coriander seed
- 2 g dried chilli flakes
- 3 fresh grape, oak or blackcurrant leaves, or 5 g black tea leaves
The skills inside
The words inside
Fermentation & PicklingTanninBlackcurrantDill
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cut 2 mm off the blossom end of every cucumber, the end opposite the stem: it carries the pectinase that turns pickles to mush.
- Dissolve the salt in the water, then pack the cucumbers upright in a crock with the dill, garlic, spices and tannin leaves.
- Pour the brine over, weight everything under the surface, and leave 3 cm of headspace beneath a loose lid or airlock.
- Hold at 18 to 21C (64 to 70F). The brine clouds and fizzes by day 3; skim any white film as it appears.
- They are ready when a cut pickle is translucent to the centre with no pale opaque core and the skin has gone from bright green to olive, 7 to 14 days. Jar and refrigerate.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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