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Do you ever get a food memory? A certain smell or particular taste in a flash can take you back to a specific moment in time. I had one of those recently. I’ve been making pickles this summer for the first time. So far I’ve canned 24 pints of quick dill pickles and a few pints of bread and butter pickles. 

As I was pouring that sweet brine into the jars over the cucumbers, I immediately was transported to my kitchen as a child. My mom kept an olive-green Tupperware container in the refrigerator full of homemade pickles. I hadn’t thought about that in decades. But my brain still recognized that aroma as a scent from my past. Amazing.

Right now, is prime time for pickle making. If you like pickles, and you’ve not tried it before, I encourage you to. I recommend recipes from the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP) at nchfp.uga.edu. This is hosted by the University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences. All of their recipes are research-based and were tested at the university for food safety. You can also watch a recording from the OSU Extension Food Preservation team about making pickles at go.osu.edu/preservepickles. 

When selecting cucumbers, be sure they are the appropriate size. The recommendation is 1.5 inches for gherkins and 4 inches for dills. I use the pretty ones that are relatively straight for these. The odd-shaped cucumber, or ones that you didn’t see yesterday and are now quadruple the size you wanted them to be, are great for bread and butter style or for relishes. 

You need about one pound per pint. So that means an average of 14 pounds is needed per canner load of 7 quarts; an average of 9 pounds is needed per canner load of 9 pints. A bushel of cucumbers weighs 48 pounds.

I also ran across a very informative blog article on the NCHFP site about “dry” canning vegetables. Anyone who looks for food preservation recipes on the internet is bound to find some creative recipes and procedures for processing food. But when it comes to canning, inventive could lead to deadly. The USDA home canning procedure is meant to kill spores of Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria that cause the potentially deadly botulism poisoning. 

The liquid is a key ingredient for achieving the temperature needed to penetrate throughout the jars during processing. Bacteria and bacterial spores are more sensitive to wet heat than to dry heat. They will die in hot dry air much more slowly than in hot water. Some of these potentially dangerous recipes call for butter or ghee to be used rather than water or to be included along with water. 

NCHFP says “Canning preservation of food is not a creative activity about how to produce the best quality only. Safety must come first, and the researched processes we have for vegetables require the liquid cover in the jars (and whatever is the type of liquid called for in the described procedure with each process, which is usually water for plain vegetables).”

Food preservation can be fun, easy, and safe with information from reliable sources. If you have questions about home food preservation, please contact me at 740-622-2265 or by email at marrison.12@osu.edu .

Today I’ll leave you with this quote from Irena Chalmers: “In the last analysis, a pickle is a cucumber with experience.”

Emily Marrison is an OSU Extension Family & Consumer Sciences Educator and may be reached at 740-622-2265.

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