Fermented pickled cucumbers

I first wrote about pickling cucumbers last year, and since then I have made many batches of delicious pickles and I think I have perfected my method, so its time to tell you more.

You can pickle any type of cucumbers, but I like to grow the proper pickling cucumber or gherkins. They grow really well in my garden, even when its hot and dry, they do better than other curcubits. I usually get plenty from 2-3 plants. I like to pick them small, around the size of my thumb. Only because when they get too big its hard to fit many of them in the jar! It can be like a bit of a puzzle fitting them all in.

I also grow my own dill to flavour the pickles. It tends to bolt to seed, so I have to keep picking it regularly and I put it in salad if I have more dill than pickles.

I use the recipe from Nourishing Traditions to make the brine for the pickles - 1 cup of water, 4 tablespoons of whey (from raw milk cream cheese), and 1 tablespoon of sea salt. I usually make up one batch of brine for each jar of pickles, its good to have extra, you don't want to be stingy as the the pickles need to be fully submerged.

I put a layer of dill, mustard seeds and peppercorns in the jar, fill the jar with pickles, and then fill the jar with the brine. Then I add more dill, mustard and peppercorns.

In the last post I was confused about how to keep the pickles under the brine. I've solved that one using grape leaves. I was VERY excited when I noticed that our neighbour had a small grape vine. The grapes are terrible, but the leaves are very handy. This year every jar of pickles has had two grape leaves scrunched in the top to keep the pickles under the brine. This is much easier than trying to cut a spacer to fit and apparently this also helps to keep the pickles crunchy.

I leave the jars on the kitchen bench for about 3 days and then I put them in the fridge. They seem to last ok for several months (ours get eaten before much longer than that!).

We like to have the pickles on an antipasto platter, and especially in burgers, or stirred into a casserole (sounds weird, but its really nice). Pete reckons they taste like McDs pickles. I'm not sure if that's a compliment, but it was funny when he said it.

Have you tried fermenting anything yet?

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here . You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!). I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months. I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post! New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog. I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people. I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts. I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo. Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about...

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive! Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap. And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps. I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment. One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap. As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances). When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather. I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap. ...

Eight Acres

Search This Blog