Sweet and sour pickled cucumbers can be a real culinary delight. Let your creativity run wild when making it and choose the one you like best from a variety of different types of vinegar. There are also different options available for sweetening.
How to can sweet and sour cucumbers?
To make sweet and sour pickles, you need pickles, vinegar, honey or sugar, lime juice, mustard seeds and spices such as dill, bay leaves or juniper berries. The washed cucumbers are s alted, the broth is boiled from the remaining ingredients and both are filled into sterilized jars.
Sweet and sour pickled cucumbers
Pickling cucumbers are usually grown outdoors. The small cucumbers ripen from the summer months into autumn. In productive years there is often a veritable glut of cucumbers at this time. It's worth it if you can preserve cucumbers in different ways. In addition to pickled and s alted cucumbers, the sweet and sour variants are very popular.
- Only use perfectly good cucumbers and remove the flower base and the stem.
- Scrub the vegetables under running water. The cucumbers must be really clean and must not have any damaged areas.
- Sprinkle the cucumbers with s alt and let them sit overnight.
- The s alt is washed off the next day.
- Prepare a decoction of water, vinegar, a little lime juice, honey and mustard seeds. You can experiment to your heart's content when putting together the spices. For example, add dill, onions, bay leaves or juniper berries.
- Boil the broth and as soon as the honey has dissolved, add the cucumbers. Cook for about 5 minutes.
- Put the cucumbers with the broth into previously sterilized, i.e. boiled, screw-top jars. The stock should be filled to a centimeter below the rim of the glass, all cucumbers are covered.
- Close the jars and turn them upside down for a short time to create a vacuum.
- Let the cucumbers sit in the cellar or dark pantry for at least four weeks before tasting them.
More tips for preserving cucumbers
For sweet and sour cucumbers, you can also use sugar, white or brown, instead of honey. If you want, put other vegetables in the pickle jar, for example carrot slices, baby corn on the cob, small onions, cherry tomatoes or even a chili pepper. The chili should be deseeded, otherwise the whole thing will be too spicy. The additional vegetables are briefly boiled with the cucumbers.
Do not use iodized s alt when preserving cucumbers. Iodized s alt softens the cucumbers and takes away their flavor. It is better to use normal household s alt or sea s alt.
To prevent the cucumbers from becoming hollow on the inside, pierce them a few times with a needle before preserving. Picked cucumbers last a few times in the jar Months. If a jar is opened, you should store it in the refrigerator and consume it within a week.
