kraut thumping

Courtesy of and copyright Adam Harvey

Fermenting the night away
Fermenting the night away

She eats a sauer treat
She eats a kraut treat
She eats a yoghurt treat
She eats a salami treat

She ferments the foods that remind her of the good times
She ferments the foods that remind her of the better times

copyright & licensing

all content © VM (Vicky) Brasseur and licensed under CC BY-SA unless otherwise specified

kosher dill pickles

Spice mix:

5 g whole allspice
15 g whole black mustard seed
3 g whole cloves
5 g cinnamon stick (4” stick, roughly crushed)
5 g whole black peppercorns
0.5g crumbled dried bay leaves
5 g whole coriander seeds
5 g whole dried chile de arbol

Pickles:

3631 g whole pickling cucumbers of various small shapes and sizes
63 g peeled whole garlic cloves
61 g dill flower heads
97 g dill stems
118 g backslop from brussels sprouts, collards, leek kraut
3.0% brine to cover
A clear plastic bag with pickling cucumbers spilling out. Atop the bag leans a bunch of fresh dill. Pickling spices and some dill flower heads inside a stoneware fermenting crock Stoneware weights on top of cucumbers in the fermenting crock The 3 gallon stoneware fermentation crock sitting on the floor in a corner of the kitchen

Dill pickles have dill. Kosher dill pickles have dill and garlic. Therefore, these are kosher dill pickles, though it’s unlikely a rabbi will have the chance to confirm that.

I was at the Beaverton farmers market today and a small booth had several crates of pickling cucumbers available. I’d thought I’d missed these this season, so I picked up about eight pounds of them. Another booth had long-stemmed dill flowers for pickling, so I picked those up as well then went home to do the needful.

This is the first outing for my new-to-me three-gallon fermentation crock. I placed 1/2 of the spices, garlic, and dill flower heads at the bottom of the sanitised crock, added 1/2 the cucumbers, added the rest of the spices, garlic, and flower heads then the rest of the cucumbers. I’d cut the dill stems to fit the diameter of the crock then layered them over the cucumbers. My hope is they’ll not only add flavour but also keep the whole spices from floating to the top.

After weighing everything down with the also new-to-me fermentation weights sized to fit this crock, I added several litres of 3% brine.

The plan was to keep this down in the fermentation room (read: space under the basement stairs), but the crock is heavy when empty. When half full of cukes and brine, there was no way it was getting down the stairs safely. So it’ll be living in a corner in my kitchen for the next couple of months. At least it’ll be easy to check?

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