Bread and Butter Pickles

This time I decided to make refrigerator pickles using one recipe: Hannaford's Bread and Butter Pickles from July 2011. My mom makes amazing pickles with this recipe. We'll see if I can replicate her success.

The recipe calls for 4 pickling cucumbers, well cleaned. I don't have "pickling cucumbers" so I used a standard cucumber. My "standard" cucumber is about 1 pound size. The skin is a little tough and the seeds are big. The outside skin is smooth, deep dark green, nothing prickly.

A different recipe said to use 1 pound of cucumbers for one cup vinegar. My mom's recipe, although for "4 cucumbers," uses 1 cup of vinegar, so I figured my one cucumber would be sufficient.

This recipe also uses 2 large sweet onions. That seemed excessive, so I used the one I had.

I sliced the cucumber using my mandolin. I didn't cut myself this time! For the onion, I cut off the top, stuck the teeth of the mandolin guard into the top, and sliced the onion in that way using 1/8inch cut. I then cut the rings into quarters. I don't know if that was the best way to do it. Maybe I should have cut the onion top to bottom.

Next I used Kosher salt and mixed the cucumbers and onions with the salt. I put this in the fridge for two hours, okay maybe three.  Then rinsed them off with cold water.

For the brine, I toasted turmeric, celery seed, mustard seed, cayenne pepper and whole clove quickly in a skillet. Then I added 1 cup of white vinegar and 3/4 cup sugar (the recipe calls for 1 cup sugar, but because of my diabetes, I used a little less).

I boiled the brine for one minute then poured over my cucumbers. The amount of brine was just about perfect to cover 1pound of cucumber. I filled two of my Mason jars with the cucumbers and most of the onion.

Now it is cooling for two hours and then I will put in the fridge to eat later.