BREAD and BUTTER PICKLES

by Robin

Since I was recording my dill recipe earlier, I thought maybe it would be good to have a record of my bread-n-butter ones too.  I picked these last Thurs & Friday ( 2-day process).

I picked 31 cucumbers this day.  These were rather large. (My first big harvest of the season.) I let many of them get huge like a salad cucumber.



But, it was worth it to have so many at once and then make 10 quarts of pickles.  So, in the below picture, you can see I take off the ends and then grab my mandolin slicer for a long hour or so of slicing.  I'm not kidding when I say hour.



I filled half of my massive canning pot.



Then, I worked on 8 sweet bell peppers.  I had to buys these because mine aren't ready yet in the garden.



Mandolin slice these down too.  Then, I also give them another chop by knife to knock them down in size.



Grab a bag of onions.  These are yellow.  I think we went with 4 or 5 of them.



Looks so purdy!



Ok, remember that pot of cucumbers waiting on the counter??  Add the peppers and onions to them.



Thankfully, I had plenty of room remaining at the top of the pot.  Remember, this made 10 quarts!!



Gorgeous!   This is the stage where we added the 1/4 cup of salt.  Doesn't look like it would be enough but trust me, 1/2 cup was too much.  Last year, we iced it down and left it in the garage over night but this year, I had space to put it in my garage frig. That worked good too.



So, the next morning, get your 'cured' cukes, peppers and onions out.  Drain and rinse the excess salt away.  This is where I take a sample of one of them. If they are unbearable salty, soak them with water to get the excess out.  Hopefully, they aren't too bad.


Below is the actual recipe.   The changes I make are cutting the salt back to 1/4, maybe 1/3 if you had a monster batch, but we actually had to soak the pickles to remove salt when we tried 1/2.  It was way too much.  Also, we cut the sugar from 5 cups to 3 cups.  Still, very sweet.

Bread and Butter Pickles 2

Boil up your brine, fill your sterile quart jars up (I prefer the wide-mouth for these since the cukes are so big.) with filling veggies, then brine.

Then, I went ahead and put the jars under a  rolling, boiling water for a good 15 minutes to sterilize the whole thing.

And that is how I turn this many cukes into....



10 jars of bread and butter pickles!!  You can eat them the very next day.



I took one of my jars to a picnic and people just loved them.

Happy Pickling,
Robin