Rise and brine: our first ever Tarragon pickled cucumbers

by Mars

We saw a post on Stone Croft Skye recently (a blog that we follow) that inspired me to pickle some of our F1 mini cucumbers that have been prolific in our vegetable garden. We’ve never pickled anything before, and I do enjoy pickled cucumbers, so I set about making our own concoction with ingredients from the garden with flavours that I hope come together.

In terms of full disclosure, I made this yesterday and am yet to taste it, but we’ll share our recipe all the same because we’ve got our fingers crossed that it’s going to turn out just great.

I really like classic dill pickles, but we had to get rid of our dill this summer because it was a massive aphid magnet. So I opted for tarragon instead, which we have growing in abundance, because technically it’ll have a similar aniseed/liquorice taste profile to dill – that’s what my taste buds are communicating to my brain anyway.

With the exception of the salt, sugar and vinegar, everything else was sourced from our garden so it’s as close to organic pickled cucumbers as we could get.

What surprised me was how remarkably rewarding the process of pickling was, and it was great fun to put everything together. If this recipe turns out to be a success, I’ll make a few more jars that will hopefully keep into the winter.

Ingredients

  • Cucumbers (six in our case)
  • 150 ml white vinegar
  • 150 ml cider vinegar
  • 250 ml water
  • 2 tablespoons salt
  • 2 teaspoons sugar
  • 2 tablespoons coriander seeds
  • 2 bay leaves
  • Horse radish (coarsely chopped)
  • Celery stalks
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • Tarragon

The process I followed was really quite simple. I fully dissolved the sugar and salt in the water to make a brine. I then quartered the cucumbers and put them in the jar and started to fill the sides and gaps with the tarragon, horseradish, garlic and all the remaining ingredients. Once everything was in place with little space to push anything else in, the water went in and I topped it up with the vinegar. Bish, bosh bang. Job done.

The amount of liquid and ingredients you’ll need will vary on the size of your jar and how much you jam into it, but you can use our ingredients as a ratio.

The jar went straight into the fridge, and now we wait. Since we’ve never done this before, we don’t really know how long it’ll take for the pickles to taste pickly. Some online recipes say 24 hours – others have said a week. I won’t be tempted. We’ll leave ours doing their thing in the fridge for a week, and then take a nibble and see where we are. We will post our taste test.

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