My first time making lacto-fermented dill pickles!
In Winnipeg, local pickling cucumbers became available in early July. I bought a few pounds to try pickling.
Some of the pickles were quite large, so to help them fit, I cut them into quarters.
I'd never made nor eaten this type of pickle before, so I decided to try different seasoning combinations. The base recipe (left) contained: yellow mustard seed, black peppercorns, coriander, cloves and scapes/flower of garlic; and dill seed, leaves, and flowerheads. The middle jar doesn't have coriander. The right-most jar also contains grated and salted horseradish which I froze in fall.
Unfortunately, the horseradish flavour did not survive the freezer, and was barely detectable in the finished product.
After a few hours in the brine, the cucumber skins turned an unbelievably bright, deep green, which was surreal to see! This happens as the acidity increases and microbes begin eating the surface of the cucumbers.
On day 3 or 4, the brine turned cloudy, which happens as lactic acid is produced. I've read a few different explanations for the cloudiness:
It's the high density of active, living microbes
It's the high density of dead microbes still suspended in the solution
It's lactic acid (I don't really believe that)
Numbers 1 and 2 seem the most plausible, because the cloudiness clears up a little after a few days, and a whitish sediment can be seen settling. If #3 were true, that wouldn't explain why the brine clears up after a few days.
Because this was my first time, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to make "half-sours" or "full-sours".
Half-sours are fermented for about 4 days. The pickles still have a whitish (or marbled) flesh, instead of being uniformly translucent.
Full-sours are fermented for about 7 days or longer. The flesh is more uniformly translucent. In order to match this longer ferment time, the salinity is typically increased (compared to half-sours). But hypothetically, you could use the same salt content and just ferment longer--at the risk of a softer (less crunchy) pickle--which is what I did.
Here in Winnipeg, with a room temperature below 23C (air conditioned), the quartered cucumbers reached half-sour by about Day 3-4:
And the intact cucumbers reached half-sour by about Day 5-6:
These half-sours were mild, but still pleasingly crunchy!
Putting them in the fridge on Day 6 didn't halt the fermentation soon/fast enough, and these pickles turned full-sour in the fridge, and got a little softer. So my next batch of intact cukes will go in the fridge on Day 4 or 5.
I've also learned that I want a really dilly dill pickle, so I should add more dill than I think I need! I wonder if toasting the dill seed will alter the flavour of the finished product very much?
The taste was different from storebought garlic dill pickles (vinegar-pickled) that I've tried. The acidity was less harsh, for one! There was also an additional flavour, which I guess was the "fermented cucumber" flavour. It's difficult to put my finger on what that means exactly.
The quartered pickles got a little soft, so I minced them and will be turning them into relish (a future blog post, once I've figured out a recipe!).
