For The Best Homegrown Pickles, Pick Your Cucumbers In The Early Morning

Everyone should get to experience the particular joy that comes with giving or receiving something edible and homemade. If you have, you know that gifts don't have to cost money to leave an impression. A pint of jam, a frozen lasagna, a pie, or a loaf of bread — or, these days, even a sourdough starter — are all welcome options. If you ask us, homemade pickles are up there with the crème de la crème of offerings that will win the heart of any food-lover in your life, including yourself. Best of all, they can keep for a really long time. 

The process of making pickles from scratch may sound like a daunting task for beginners, but it's easier than you might think. And as the old saying goes, once you pickle your own 'cukes for the first time, you never go back. With that in mind, there are a few things to remember to make the best (read: crunchiest) batch of pickles. For starters, you should pluck your cucumbers from the ground early in the morning. Here's why.

Fifth-generation homesteader and author Melissa K. Norris has made her fair share of pickles. For the crunchiest batch possible, she suggests picking your cucumbers from the ground in the early morning, "before the sun or heat of the day is on them," and when they're still small. She puts on her gardening gloves around 8 am to get the freshest Chicago pickling cucumbers (though you can use any pickling variety of your choosing). "Most folks agree [that] small cucumbers equal crunchier pickles," she says, adding that soft cucumbers are impossible to "crunch back up." If you don't have access to garden space, keep the smaller-is-crunchier tip in your mind when you're shopping for cucumbers.

Once you have your haul, time is of the essence. Norris says it's important to start pickling right away, lest your cucumbers lose their firmness. If that's not an option, you can store them in your fridge's vegetable crisper for a few days. After removing the blossoms from the ends of the cucumbers and letting them soak in a bath of salted ice water, you're ready to get pickling. 

There's a lot to consider when making your own pickles, but the most fun part — not counting eating your pickles, of course — is choosing your spices. You can always go a classic route with fresh dill, garlic cloves, mustard seeds, celery seeds, whole black peppercorns, with other spices — unless you want to make bread and butter pickles. The blend isn't far off from the kind you'd find in a standard jar of NYC-style kosher dill pickles.

Once you master the basics, you might consider straying from tradition with your own signature pickle flavors. You'll always need vinegar (Norris recommends white or apple cider vinegar with 5% acidity or higher), but you can have fun with the spices. Or you could really spice things up with a Spicy Southern Pickle recipe, which calls for sugar, garlic, Indian round chilies, bay leaves, chunks of onion, dill, black peppercorns, and mustard seed.