hey welcome back to another slightly redneck gaming video making dill pickles today because it's cucumber season and I'm gonna share with you my favorite dill pickle recipe super easy to make and delicious so stick around we'll get right to it okay first things first we're gonna work on preparing our cucumbers it's best to have cucumbers that are no bigger than about 3-4 inches long a couple of these got a little bit big for me I'm gonna pickle these whole but you could slice them up in slices or spears or however you prefer but the smaller the cucumber you know like I said about a three to four inch cucumber the better it is it's gonna stay crispier I'm not gonna it's gonna have much better flavor to it not a whole lot to do to prep them soak them in cold water overnight I put them in ice water and leave them in the fridge overnight that's going to help with that crispness as well the only thing you need to do you've got a stem into the cucumber and then you've got a blossom in this is the end of the flower comes off you'll need to cut off about an eighth of an inch or so of that blossom in because that can add bitterness to your cucumbers so I guess maybe more like a quarter-inch sorry quarter into that so I'm gonna go ahead and do that with these and then that's really all we need to do to get my cucumbers ready for pickling so let me get this done with all my cucumbers and we'll come back and pick up the next step so we're gonna go ahead for para Brian right now we're gonna start off with a nonreactive pot stainless steel not aluminum you can use porcelain you can use a couple different things but not aluminum nonreactive whatever it is you're gonna need some salt make sure you get non-iodized salt this is a pickling and canning salt works great or you can use it kosher salt if you want to you're gonna need some vinegar I use the cheap stuff because heck is just vinegar vinegar is vinegar but do make sure that it says on the jar or on the bottle that it's distilled within 5% you may be acidity excuse me you don't want anything less than five percent acidity and that's important then you're gonna need some water we're gonna mix our brine up we're gonna mix up a gallon of brine that should do about eight pint jars or 8 quart jars excuse me you you're gonna mix it half in half two quarts of vinegar two quarts of water and two thirds of a cup of canning salt now you can scale that recipe up and down just use the same ratios do not lower the vinegar content yeah you can add more vinegar if you want to but do not lower the vinegar content 50% vinegar is the lowest recommended vinegar content for safe canning by the USDA and that for a good reason you need to have a certain pH within your products when you can them in hot water by can them like we're going to do you need to have a low enough pH that it it keeps the botulism bacteria from multiplying because when it multiplies when it reproduces it produces a toxin that can be deadly you can't smell it you can't taste it you can't see it so you wouldn't even know it's there if you have botulism in your you know canned goods you eat them you could very easily die so keep now I don't mean to scare you this is perfectly safe as long as you keep that vinegar ratio and be honest my grandmother handed this recipe down and it came out with a 1 quart of vinegar to three quarts of water and she used that for 50 years and nobody ever got sick off that but just to be on the safe side don't go below 50% vinegar 2 quarts of vinegar 2 quarts of water and that makes one gallon and again 2/3 of a cup of salt so mix all that together put it this stainless steel pot stick it on the stove and bring it up to just a boil just under a boil ok so while my Bryan's heating up I'm gonna go ahead and start preparing my jars make sure you know prepare your jars like you would for any other canning I'm not gonna do a lot of detail on that I've got another video I'll link to here that you can watch if you need help on that but - the jars we're gonna add one hot pepper I'm gonna use habaneros if you don't like spice nearly as much he's a jalapeno or you can leave the pepper out completely a couple of cloves of garlic I really like garlic so I use too close if you want to tone it down you can use one instead I'm going to put a bunch of dill just a handful of dill and again I really like dill so I'm also gonna add a tablespoon of dill seed to the jar and I'm gonna add an eighth of a teaspoon of alum and this is just let me show you what the jar looks like that's what it is alum it's for a crisping agent to help the pickles stay crisp and not get real soggy that's also a grape leaf I'm going to add into that and that's for the same purpose these have tannin in them if you can't get grape leaves you can use oak leaves they work really as well and that's also to help with Christmas so all those go in the jar and then we're going to start packing in our cucumbers and there's nothing special about the way you pack your cucumbers just shove them in there it's kind of like a big game of Tetris to get them all as many as you can to fit in there let me get these packed and then we'll come back and we'll start adding brine into these jars all right so I got my jar filled with cucumbers here ready to add my brine and that's just a simple process of just ladle it into the jars and we're gonna fill it up to about a quarter of inch of a headspace at the top of the jar there's got that filled with brine then wipe the rim like you would for normal candy and make sure it gets a good seal go put a little in it with a ring again just finger tight this is ready to go in the canner you can process it for 15 minutes or if you want to make these a refrigerator pickle then just put the key in the jar and your refrigerator let it cool off first of course put it in refrigerator let it set for a couple of days before you eat it and then use it up within a month but I'm gonna can these so I can have long-term storage so they're gonna go in the water bath canner for 15 minutes set for 5 minutes afterwards take them out and let them cool off all right well that's about all there is to it it's pretty simple process and you can pickle okra the same way I do my okra and I also do a zoo Keeney in the same same process for those so it works for many different vegetables and it's a great brine and a great solution to use for that so hopefully enjoyed this video hopefully you learned something hit the subscribe button below if you want to see more comment from our more video content from me and as always god bless you