We are now all up to our eyebrows in Pandemic - avoiding people, wearing masks (or not, if that is what your quack science is telling you) - sorry honey, it's my blog and I can call people out here if I want - the current major stressor is attempting to send our kids back to school, or (as I like to call it) sending our kids and their teachers into the petri dish of virus and see how they do.
My main ways of combating the general stress of the current political idiocy, worldwide pandemic, job burnout, and climate crisis implosion that hovers on the horizon is to spend time in my garden....a lot of time in my garden. I know that I have probably written about pickles before, but honestly I can't remember and I am honestly just too lazy to go back and check out all the posts I have had before, so I will just bring pickles up again because they seem fitting to the current strife we are all suffering.
I have always sort of had a love/hate relationship with making pickles. Originally, when I would plant cucumbers I would make vinegar pickles and they would be alright, but nothing like the hard, crunchy Gherkins I grew up eating all the time. And then somewhere along the line, I thought it might be fun to do fermented pickles - the original way of making a pickle that involved putting it in a salt brine and waiting for it to "pickle" itself using the yeast present in the very air we breathe. I did a little research and obtained a few "crocks" that I used and then proceeded to fill them with garlic, cucumbers and dill heads and wait....
Often that waiting lead to some amount of mold on top of my crocks that was simply too scary to venture into in order to taste the pickles. The long and short of it was that I let them sit too long in the crock.
Pickles are incredibly easy when you really get down to it - even easier than making the vinegar type that you will typically see recipes for because humanity has either forgotten or lost all trust in things that are naturally fermented on their own kitchen counters. So let me break it down for anyone that wants to give it a go.
Cucumbers: Not every Cucumber is the same. There are "pickling" cucumbers and "Slicing" cucumbers. If your goal is to make a good pickle, you will want the "pickling" type. This is analogous to politics in some ways - sorry to do this to all you that just wanted a pickle recipe, but really, it is important. If you want a good government (pickle) you have to pick the appropriate type - you don't want to pick someone who doesn't have any confidence in government and would rather "shrink it down to the size that could be drowned in a bathtub" as Grover Norquist was noted for saying - you want to pick the person that actually believes in the premise of the Constitution that says, "for the people, by the people" Pick your seeds carefully because at the end of the season, they will definitely influence the taste and quality of the pickle you have.
Tannins: These are the things that give a pickle its "crunch" and save them from being mushy after pickling. These are often found in leaves with some "stiffness" to them, such as grape, horseradish, oak or bay leaves. These leaves might be considered analogous to one's education - if it is full and robust, it makes for a better pickle - without an education (or tannin containing leaves) all you are left with is mush.
Salt: A salt brine helps to prevent bacterial takeover of your pickles. For generations salt has been used as a preservative for many foods and, similar to sugar, its high percentage prevents bacteria from getting a foothold. Since we are currently on a political bent
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