Easy Homemade Kosher Dill Pickles

Finding a good recipe for homemade kosher dill pickles can be a gamble. I’ve gone through many recipes that didn’t quite hit the mark and some that were downright awful. Finally I discovered a recipe that’s perfect. For starters, these pickles are fermented in quart jars, so I can make as many or as few jars as I have cucumbers for. Plus — compared to fermenting in a crock — if one jar doesn’t turn out right, the whole batch isn’t ruined. And these pickles aren’t processed in a canner. They are fresh, crunchy pickles that taste similar to Clausen kosher dills.

Growing the Cucumbers

The first thing you need is a type of cucumber developed for pickling. Cucumbers intended for pickling are small and firm, so they stay crisp.

Growing your own means the cucumbers can be pickled fresh, which helps keep them crisp. We make enough jars each year to last until the following season, and they remain crisp to the end.

The pickler variety we grow is Little Leaf, a prolific cucumber that doesn’t attract cucumber beetles and produces a few weeks longer than most other varieties. We harvest every other day, selecting cukes that are at least 1½ inches and no more than 4 inches long. Anything bigger either goes into a salad or gets dehydrated to make winter treats for our dairy goats.

As soon as the cucumbers are picked we scrub them and snip off the blossom end. It’s the end opposite the stem end, and has a rough round spot, instead of a smooth, indented spot where the cuke was removed from the vine. The blossom end contains enzymes that cause pickles to go soft, as I sadly learned the year I forgot to cut off the blossom ends.

Recipe for Kosher Dill Pickles

Once I have all the cukes cleaned, trimmed, and prepared for pickling, I guesstimate how many clean widemouth quart jars I’ll need. Each jar takes roughly 12 cukes, depending on their size. This recipe is for one jar:

Allow the brine to cool. Pour it over the pickles and loosely seal jar. Place the jar on a plate or tray (in case the jar spews) at room temperature away from direct sunlight. Once or twice a day tighten the lid, turn the jar upside down to shake, then return upright and loosen the lid. Refrigerate pickles after they have fermented for three full days.

Because our pickles are refrigerated for as long as a year, we vacuum seal the jars. The vacuum seal both keeps the pickles fresh and prevents the refrigerator from developing a pickle odor.

Homemade Kosher Dill Notes

Pickled whole garlic cloves are crunchy and delicious. In my opinion they are just as good as the pickles themselves.

Similarly, when we manage to grow baby onions (by planting onion sets much closer together than usual), I’ll use whole baby onions instead of minced. When I do mince the onions, after a pickle jar is empty I strain out the onions and add them to tuna or egg salad.

Some years the dill lags behind the cucumbers and I’ve had to use dried dill. It’s not nearly as good as fresh dill, so I came up with this solution: When dill is abundant, I fill wide mouth quart jars with fresh dill heads and dill weed, cover with vinegar, vacuum seal, and refrigerate. I use this vinegar for making pickles, regardless of whether I have enough fresh dill or I need to use dried dill. Either way, it enhances the pickles’ dilly flavor.

To save myself from calculations when I make more than one jar of homemade kosher dill pickles at a time, I created a table in my recipe notebook. For your benefit I’ve posted that table here. The format works on a desktop monitor or tablet, but unfortunately not on a smart phone. Sorry ’bout that!