Pickle & Condiment Atlas · Side
Half-Sour Dills in Salt Brine
- Intermediate
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, aromatics blooming from the first bite, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 1 kg small ridged pickling cucumbers
- 1 litre unchlorinated water
- 35 g fine sea salt
- 40 g dill, stalks and seed heads
- 20 g garlic, cloves bruised
- 5 g black peppercorns
- 3 g coriander seed
- 2 g yellow mustard seed
- 2 grape, oak or blackcurrant leaves
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: mustard
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
- Trim 3 mm from the blossom end of every cucumber, the end without the stem scar. Scrub off any grit.
- Stir the salt into the water until clear. This is a 3.5 percent brine and the ratio is the whole recipe.
- Pack cucumbers upright with the dill, garlic, spices and the tannin leaves, then pour on the brine and weight everything below the surface.
- Cover loosely and hold at 18-22C (64-72F). Bubbles start on day two and the brine clouds; this is correct.
- Taste from day three. Pull them at half-sour, still bright green at the core, usually day four to six, and refrigerate to stall the ferment.
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
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.