Lean and lovin' it: Sugar-free garlic dill pickles you can make at home
It had been a long time since I'd made pickles and the pickles I'd been making before I'd lost 150 pounds were a unique brown-sugar-sweetened bread and butter pickle. My distinctive pickles looked like they were floating in beef gravy. That pickle recipe also included chunks of sweet onion and sweet green pepper. Yup, definitely different.
Bread-and-butter pickles have been my favorite for decades. They were the only pickles my maternal grandmother, Nana, served alongside her "comfort food" ham sandwiches.
I like dill pickles, too, but for a completely different reason. A high school girlfriend turned me on to delicatessen-made corned beef sandwiches on rye and they always came with a dill pickle spear, or two. Still love those sandwiches and the dills that go with them.
Besides the significant difference in those pickle flavors, there's also a difference in how pickles are made that creates textural changes. There's processed and unprocessed or refrigerated pickles.
Processed pickles have been canned, essentially cooked in a boiling water bath to sterilize.
Processed pickles are keepers; they're pantry-shelf staples and can linger there, unopened, for a year, safe to eat any time. After opening, they should be refrigerated. That safety factor also makes those pickles soft in texture, because they're really cooked.
Unprocessed pickles, sometimes called refrigerator pickles, are far easier to make than processed. Unprocessed pickles are crisp in texture with, generally, bigger flavors coming from the added herbs (like dill) and spices (like bay leaves). Their textural difference is nothing short of enormous; they're crisp and crunchy. Their flavors are clean and bold.
The negative: they a-l-w-a-y-s have to be kept refrigerated.
Several years ago a vendor at a farmers market gave me a handwritten copy of a dill pickle recipe that he swore was "absolutely the best." Expecting exceptional results in my very early foray into pickledom, I bought a one-gallon pickle jar.
That farmer sold me enough kirby cucumbers to fill my pickle jar and I followed that farmers market recipe exactly. I let those pickles cure in their brine for a couple days and then dipped into the jar for my first taste. I had very high expectations. That pickle was, in a single word, terrible; tough and chewy without much flavor.
Thinking they had not cured for sufficient time, I let them brine for a few more days. Same issues; tough skins with little flavor. I kicked myself for making so many of them; failure on a fairly grand scale.
I stayed away from making homemade pickles until I discovered the recipe for that special brown-sugar-sweetened pickle. From the first, those turned out great. Today, 10 years later, that brown sugar (emphasis on sugar) has become an avenue I rarely walk down. Nope, for me sugar is out.
Dill pickles are another almost no-added-sugar story. My recent return to making "refrigerated" garlicky dill pickles have turned out so well, I'll probably never again buy supermarket pickles again.
I've been tinkering with my dill pickle recipe for a few weeks now. If you want to see how easy it is to make your own pickles try this.
• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@theleanwizard.com.