Refrigerator Pickles
I love pickles! Traditional Dill Pickles, pickled okra, pickled everything…….Maybe not pickled eggs.. But you get the point.
I was hoping this blog post would include how to make refrigerator pickles and my experience pickling banana peppers, but the peppers did not turn out so great, so I am going to try again with those. Hoping to perfect those soon, until then I now have 3 jars of mushy banana peppers. I am going to try and figure out a way to use those…. So if you have any ideas, let me know. The flavor turned out great, just not crispy like I was hoping. Pretty sure I know what happened, but I’ll try again and see if I can get that fixed. In the meantime they look pretty in their glass jars!
I have attempted making pickles a couple times, never very successfully. A could years ago I got a good amount of cucumbers from my mother in law and decided I would try my hand at pickles. MAJOR FAIL!!! Everything about the pickles turned out terrible! They flavor was off, they turned out mushy, all around bad. So, this year I was determined to figure this whole pickle thing out.
One afternoon Colby’s mom had pickles out for lunch. Not canned or from the store, just something she said she made. Here is where my love for refrigerator pickles was born! I had heard about refrigerator pickles before, but had never tried making them. No canning needed; which is great because I always feel like if I can something I need to wait a while before eating it. Maybe that’s just me, but I feels like I have to hold onto it until the winter since I put all the effort into canning it. With refrigerator pickles, we can start eating them almost immediately. We started eating ours about 24 hours after making them! Winning
I took my mother-in-law’s recipe and put my own spin on it. I started by slicing 3 cucumbers. I like my pickles a bit thicker, but you could slice them as thin or as thick as you want. You could also use a mandoline slicer to make slicing easier, but I just prefer using a knife. I’ve also cut my fingers pretty bad on those before. Next I sliced a small yellow onion and a green bell pepper. I sliced these as thin as I could. I know this seems odd to add to pickles, but the onions and peppers were amazing in there. Trust me on this!
Once everything was all sliced, I threw the cucumbers, onions and peppers into a large glass pyrex bowl. Then I made the pickling brine: vinegar, salt, sugar and celery seed. Mixed it up and added it to the bowl. I popped the top on and shook it up and then stuck it in the fridge. Just like that we had pickles. Easy enough right? Twenty-Four hours later we were eating pickles almost each time we walked into the kitchen.
The cucumbers stay so crispy in the fridge, it is wonderful! Ours were gone in about a week, onions and peppers included! We ate them on sandwiches, added them to salads and ate them straight from the bowl! Colby would come home from work, sit at the table and eat pickles. I am so glad I finally found a pickle recipe that works for me. I hope it works for you and that you love making fresh pickles as much as I do.
I am going to attempt to make another version of these this week and add in some heat to see how those turn out. Stayed tuned on those!
