Brine-Pickled Sliced Cucumber with Garlic

It's been a couple years since I started this lacto-fermentation journey and I've perfected my technique by now such that I can select just the right foods, mix the brine, and have a culture started in less than 30 minutes now.  Today's batch - in less than 30 minutes from counter to fermentation wait...


The first step is selection, cleaning, slicing, and filling.

Pick a nice firm vegetable (in this case a cucumber with a few cloves of garlic) and slice it fairly thick on the mandolin.  Clean an appropriately sized wide-mouth jar and filter about a half-gallon of water.  Layer the vegetables into the jar.

No particular OCD is required in the layering - just get them into the jar whole and shake it around some to settle.

I measure my salt by weight and I want a brine of just about 2% with most vegetables.  To get that percentage I use 5g per cup of filtered water of salt.  "How many tablespoons is that?"  DON'T MEASURE THAT WAY!!!  Weigh it.  Different salts and salt grinds have a vastly different volume capacity than each other at the same weight.  Use a scale and weight your salt or you risk destroying a batch because of too much or too little.

Here I'm making a half-gallon and needed one-and-one-half quarts of filtered water to fill the jar after the veggies were added.  A 1.5 qts is 6 cups.  6 cups x 5g per cup is 30g of salt.  I'm using a plain, cheap, coarse sea salt.

You can use Kosher or fine imported Sol de Mare or some magical pink Himilayan or Celtic Grey or...  table salt is probably a bad call, it has anticaking agents in it that will discolor your brine.  There's just something nice about the ease of using a plain sea salt - it doesn't have to be any imported specialty either.  Just make sure it's food grade salt for people.

Then I fill the jar to the lower edge of the rim, add the salt, add whatever herbs and spices I'd like (this batch has 2TBS of standard store-bought pickling spice), and cap it.  Invert it, roll it around, shake gently, etc to distribute everything...

Put on the air-lock system lid (which don't have to use if you don't want but it makes everything much easier and keeps nasty-bits out of your pickles) and set it in a correct temperature area for a week.  Leave it alone for the week - don't sneak a taste, don't open it up, do nothing but make sure the air lock has water in it.  It should bubble and brew within two days and will be rather tasty in five.  How long it takes to finish to your tastes depends on factors like your tastes, the temperature of the spot you put it in, and the vegetable's biocontent when you added them.  A particularly cold spot will take longer than a particularly hot spot.  A hot spot will ferment some mushy pickles though.  Store in the fridge until they're gone or for four months - probably won't last four months.

That's it!  No complex ingredients list.  No complicated process.  Not even a lot of your personal attention.