Recipes From the Garden: Garlic Dill Pickles

This is my Nana's recipe and I modified it slightly. This makes 6 quarts.

Garlic Dill Pickles

Ingredients:
Cucumbers (amount needed depends on size of your cucumbers)
Dill 6-12 heads fresh and 2 Tbsp dill seed or if no fresh dill, 12 Tbsp dill seed
Garlic 6-12 cloves and 2 Tbsp minced
Vinegar 3 quarts
Water 3 quarts
Canning Salt 1 Cup

Directions:
1. Wash cucumbers and pack in sterilized qt jars. You can do whole cucumbers, slices, or spears, whatever works with the size of cucumbers you are working with. My cucumbers are HUGE so I used spears and slices for all of my pickles.

2. Add 1-2 clove garlic and 1-2 heads of fresh dill to each jar. If you can't find fresh dill you can use 2 Tablespoons dill seed per Qt.

3. Bring to a boil equal parts white vinegar and water (3 qts each) and 3/4 to 1cup canning salt. Be sure to use a non reactive pot, NO COPPER! I also added 2 Tbsp minced garlic and 2 Tbsp dill seed to the brine while it was boiling to give it a little more garlic dill flavor.

4. Pour brine into jars and seal according to your preferred canning method. I used the hot water bath method for sealing the lids.

Loving the garden

I have been SO busy, but am loving the garden. We are finally getting some zucchini. So we now have tons of tomatoes and cucumbers, and squash, zucchini, and okra. We also have baby corn and jalapeno peppers, just waiting on them to get bigger.

I canned 6 quarts of garlic dill pickles this weekend. I made 3 quarts of dill chips and 3 quarts of dill spears. I have never tried to can or pickle before, but it really was not too bad.