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Hello everyone, this is Stephanie Manley with CopyKat.com. I want to show
you how you can make homemade dill pickles, and yes, you can make these at
home. They're fun, they're easy, and it takes just a little bit of time--
like four to six weeks. But hey, let's get started.
So the first thing we need to do is we need to go ahead and get some nice,
about three or four inch long pickling cucumbers. And then you're going to
need to wash them really, really good. And go ahead and discard any that
have any brown or soft spots. Those would be great to like have tonight for
dinner; not the brown or soft spots part, but whenever we're doing pickling
or anything like that we want to go ahead and discard any portions of the
vegetables that are soft or past their prime because those are going to
make the whole batch turn out kind of crummy. So don't use those. Use fruit
and vegetables that are in their absolute prime.
Now I'm going to go ahead and cut mine up. Now I need to snip off both
ends. You do need to do this because sometimes there's a little bit of
bacteria on the ends that can interfere with the fermentation process, and
since we're actually fermenting these ourselves and we're not processing
them through a canning process, we want to go ahead and take a couple extra
moments to go ahead and take our time and process our food properly.
So once you get all of your pickles cut, we're going to put those to the
side, and next we're going to start working on our dill. You can buy this
stuff. They do sell it in stores. Don't buy the stuff in plastic
containers. You won't get these beautiful flowers in there, and that's what
we're really trying to aim for are these wonderful flowers. We are going to
use a little bit of the green stems as well, but these beautiful flowers
here is where all of the flavor is. So we've got a good handful of those.
We have a few stems and lots of garlic, because you all know how I feel
about garlic. I love it.
So into the crock this goes, half of all of our vegetables now. Now I got
my crock in Shipshewana, Indiana, and any time I get a chance to say
Shipshewana, Indiana, I'm going to do that. Now I'm going to show you my
secret, or not so secret ingredient right now, and that's crab boil. Now
crab boil is a seasoning blend that we love here in the South. We love to
boil our shrimp in there. All right, so into the crock goes some water. Now
go ahead and go to my website for the exact instructions and ingredients.
So in goes two cups of water; I'm going to put our salt in there. We're
going to put some more water in there, and I'm going to give it a nice stir
and a little bit of vinegar. Amazingly, this doesn't take that much
vinegar. You're going to use the white distilled vinegar, the kind that's
in those big jugs that has like a Heinz label on it, or any old plain white
distilled vinegar works great.
We have half of our seasonings in there, most of our water, and our
vinegar. I'm going to give this a quick little stir, and then I'm going to
add in my cucumbers. Now again, this process takes a while, so you're not
going to have cucumbers anytime soon. Well, you'll have cucumbers, but you
won't have dill pickles any time soon. This is going to take about four to
six weeks. It's a wonderful fermentation process here.
Now you really do need to have kind of a cool house to do this in. Really
ideally it should be below 75 degrees, 70 or lower is wonderful. But it is
summertime in most of the states right now, and it's a little bit hard to
achieve. So as cold as you can get it, and I just like to shove my crock in
a nice dark place and forget about it. You're going to check it every now
and then to make sure that nothing's molded in there. If you're cleaned
everything properly, it shouldn't be an issue.
I have in my cucumbers, and the next thing we're going to do is we're going
to add enough water to go ahead and cover the cucumbers completely. We
really don't want any portions that are sticking out while some are
sticking in. Then we're going to go ahead and add in the remainder of our
seasonings here. And I just want to give you a look of what that looks like
in here.
So now we need to go ahead and stir this all in together, and I'm going to
have to put a weight on this to make sure that the cucumbers don't float
upwards. So I'm going to take a soup dish and put it inside of a Ziploc bag
so I can get the dish back out because I'll need to check on this
periodically, and you'll be able to see this in the follow-up video to
this. It's going to take me a little bit to get this one out, but I will
walk you through this whole process of making homemade dill pickles. So be
sure to stay tuned so you can see what's cooking next.