Alton Brown Makes Homemade Dill Pickles _ Good Eats _ Food Network

Cleanliness is next to pickle .

So scrub £3 of 3 to 5 inch cubes under warm water while you're at it , trim off any into the stem , they contain an enzyme that can soften cucumbers time to brine and these amounts are important .

Five and one half ounces by weight of pickling salt goes into a one gallon container .

Why ?

Because we're going to dissolve said salt in exactly one gallon of water .

Now , keep in mind that chlorine will kill our little bacterial buddies here .

So either use filtered water , have a filter on this system or you're going to have to use bottled water .

Do me a favor .

Give that a stir every now and then .

Now the most popular pickle flavor time has got to be dill and it comes in two culinary forms .

Here , we have a teaspoon of dill seed which we will use , but we also have one large bunch of dill frons .

Now , if we want to turn these into kosher dills , we'll need to add garlic .

I have two crushed cloves here and I also like to add a little heat .

So one tablespoon each black peppercorns and red pepper flake now we're ready to build the croc .

I don't want to just dump the cucumbers in .

So I'm gonna lay it on its side and arrange these vertically that will ensure that each one gets its share of the flavor .

I just pour this on to your cucumbers until they float up to about two inches from the top of the croc .

You'll see some of the spices floating .

That's ok .

And we'll stop about there .

We've got plenty of brine left over and some of that is going to go into a zip top bag .

This is going to be our weight , our lid , so to speak , you could do this with regular fresh water .

But what if it were to spring a leak ?

You would be in trouble then because your brine would end up being too diluted .

So make sure that this is good and sealed .

You can throw away whatever brine you've got left there that goes on top and should hold everything down with a little room to spare .

Temperature is a big factor in fermentation .

We don't want to let this get higher than say 75 degrees fermentation would still take place , but it would be really , really slow , which is not something we want to do .

So we're aiming for 68 to 70 degrees tops .

Now , if you do not have your own climate controls , you want cooler like this .

Don't despair .

Just look for any clean spot in your house .

That will maintain that temperature .

If it's a clean corner of your basement , that's fine .

In the winter , I've actually used my , my own garage and in the summer time , uh , when my air conditioning was broken , I put my croc in a cooler , uh , that I just added some ice to , uh , every day or two to the cooler , not to the crop .

That would be a bad thing .

So 68 70 degrees tops for three days .

Three , count them , not two , not 43 .

I'll be back now from here on out .

Think of this croc as your virtual pet .

It does not need to be walked or talked to or scratched behind the ears , but it will need to be skimmed of scum uh each and every day or at least every couple of days .

Now , here's how I do it .

Most of the scum will actually be on the bag itself so carefully lift and just dunk that right into a vessel of clean water and it'll wash off then take a spoon and look around the edges and just scrape off anything that kind of looks white and moldy .

It's not actually mold .

At least it shouldn't be every now and then it is , but usually it's just left over stuff byproduct from the fermentation process .

If any of it gets down actually on the pickles , try to get that off best you can there .

Last step , gonna wipe that down with a clean paper towel right along the edge .

Try not to let anything fall in .

You're gonna get a few of the herbs and that's ok .

There we go .

Take a look at your bag .

Make sure that it's relatively clean .

There we go and right back in place and make sure that you don't use tap water for that tap water contains chlorine and chlorine will be bad .

Pickles should be mostly fermented in somewhere from 6 to 10 days .

You'll know when mostly Fermin has been reached because the bubbling will stop .

At that point , you've got some choices to make .

You could move your pickles to the refrigerator .

Uh replace the bag with a loose cover like a plate and continue scumming occasionally for about three days .

Uh The cold will put the brakes on the fermentation and you'll have yourself a polish or Hungarian dill pickle , which is a very nice pickle .

Indeed .

If you then move the pickles into a jar , strain the juice and add that cover it , keep it refrigerated , you'll keep them for up to two months if they last that long .

If you know what I'm .