Pickling cucumbers for Evo:
Cucumbers - should be green, small, fresh and hard. Start with a small batch, like 2 kg, plus one whole dill, half a garlic, an inch of horseradish, several leaves of cherry. Dill and garlic are a must, you can experiment with other spices - for example mustard plant seeds.
Salt - you need a non iodized salt, in Poland it is sold as salt for pickles, could be kosher salt will do. Iodine stops bacterial growth so it slows down fermentation.
I have read commercially sold cucumbers are somehow sterilized when packed, so they don't have correct bacteria on the skin - that means fermentation won't start. I buy cucumbers for pickling at the local marketplace, they are just collected and brought there without any special treatment.
You will need a jar or several. 2 L will do. Look for a lid (or small plate, or something else) that you put INSIDE the jar and over the cucumbers, and something heavy (stone that will not split will do) that you can put on the lid to keep the cucumbers from going up. Wash or even scald stone/lid/jar.
Boil the water and dissolve salt - I am taking a heaped tablespoon per 1L of water, but the salt I am using is usually a little bit wet, so it is a large heap. Exact recipes call for 50 g per 1L. Let it cool down.
Wash the cucumbers but don't peel, nor remove ends.
Put them into a jar tighly, but not too tightly, together with dill and garlic cloves (peel the garlic), you may put them in layers or stick dill and garlic between. I take whole dill plant (just no underground part), break it and bend it, and put it into jar as a whole, but you may cut it into smaller pieces. Crushing the stem a little bit won't hurt. You want cucumbers to be tight as they will want to float, if they are tight enough they can't go up. Don't put too much - you want them covered and you don't want anything to be sticking out after you add the brine, and they will want to float. Once they start fermenting level of the brine will go up, so leave place for that, otherwise you will have a pool around the jar.
Pour brine over the cucumbers, put the small lid on them, put the stone on the lid. It is best if you have just a brine surface without anything sticking out. Close the jar with a normal lid - not necessarily too tightly.
Put in a not too bright place - neither warm nor cold, room temperature will do. Wait.
In a few days the brine will get cloudy - that's correct. If there is anything floating on the brine surface it can get covered with mold - it is better to avoid it, but it doesn't mean that the cucumbers are spoiled. Remove the mold. As long as they smell sour and don't stink they are OK. After 10 days/two weeks they should be already tasty, even if not fully fermented yet. They may be slimy to the touch - don't worry if they smell good. You may wash them before eating.
Note: this approach gives correct results almost always, but as with every natural fermentation, something can go wrong. A lot depends on cucumbers (they say if cucumbers were fertilized too much they won't get pickled), water (I have heard someone saying he always goes to his Mom to make pickled cucumbers, as when made from the water at his home they get soft) and place where they are prepared (my guess is that in some places air is full of germs). It is also told that women during menstruation should be not allowed to prepare cucumbers for pickling - no idea if there is any truth to it, but as in every folk lore, there might be some
Yeah, because he 'aint nobodies *****.'
I like making them because it makes the house smell good. Even Duke likes them - chipotle, paprika and all.
I think I will have that engraved on my tombstone.
