Many people are growing and preserving their
own foods. Maybe to save money, maybe to support
local growers, maybe so they know exactly
what ingredients are used in the food to prepare
and serve to your family. Whatever the reason,
its important you use safe food preservation
methods, so in the long run, your food is safe
to eat.
Hi, I'm Linnette Goard, Field Specialist in
Food Safety with Ohio State University Extension.
And today, we're going to be making and canning
pickles. Well, to start out you need to choose
cucumbers and you can get those cucumbers
in your backyard garden or a local farm market.
There is a difference in the cucumbers that
you might choose to have. These are pickling
cucumbers and you'll see that they are smaller
and when you cut them open the seeds are going
to be smaller and they're much better to use
when making pickles. These are what you call
in hand or eating cucumbers. And when you
cut those open they have a much larger seed
and they're not suited really for pickling.
So you want to choose a pickling cucumber.
The other kind of ingredients that you'll
need, because our cucumbers are low acid,
we need to add an acid to them to make them
high enough of an acid to water bath can them
and to safely do that. So we're going to add
or we're going to use a canning or a pickling
salt, we're going to use vinegar and that
raises that acidic content and we're going
to use our pickling spices. You can purchase
those spices all in one container or you can
choose to mix your own and use celery seed,
mustard seed and then allspice. The other
things that we'll need are your canning jars.
And we're going to choose to use pint jars
today. These are a canning type jar, a Mason
jar, and they're thick quality. You don't
want to use that canning jar or jar that comes
from the store like an old pickle jar or mayonnaise
jar. They could break when you put them into
the canner. And then we're going to use a
two piece lid. We have an inner lid and then
an outer rim that we're going to use for those.
So to get started today, we're going to wash
our cucumbers.
Now that our cucumbers are washed, we're ready
to get started. And the first thing that we
want to do is cut them for your jars. You
take a cucumber. We can leave the stem on
if you want to or you can cut it off. I'm
probably going to cut those off today because
I'm going to make slices for jars. The blossom
end you always want to remove. And take at
least a fourth inch off the end of that because
if you leave that blossom end on, that's what
makes your pickles soft. And so by cutting
that off you're taking the enzyme away that
softens your cucumber. So we're gonna start cutting them for the jars.
And make about a fourth inch slices.
Okay, we finished cutting our cucumbers, the
last bit to go in our bowl. The next thing
we're going to do is we're going to take our
cucumbers and cover them with pickling salt
or canning salt. We use a pickling or a canning
salt. It is non-iodized because we don't want
the iodine in there and its a specialized
salt that doesn't get cloudy or grimy during
the process. So we're going to sprinkle that
over the top of our cucumbers. What this does
is it pulls some of that liquid out of there,
it keeps our cucumbers crisp and it'll help
keep our pickles crisp when we go to can them.
So we're going to take this and we're going
to put it in the refrigerator for 3-4 hours.
Before putting your cucumbers in the refrigerator, you want to cover them with a layer of ice.
This will help them remain crisp.
The next thing we want to do is go ahead and make our pickling brine. And we're going to start with vinegar.
Add sugar. 
We're making sweet pickles.
And our pickling spices.
We're going to mix this up and then we're
going to take it back to the stove and heat
it to boiling.
Okay, after our cucumbers have been in the
refrigerator for about 3 hours, 
we're going to drain them.
And then they're ready to pack into our jars.
We're using pint jars today.
And a raw pack
method which means we take the raw cucumbers
and put them into our jars. Pack them pretty
tightly because they will shrink as they process.
And we want to pack them within a half inch
of the top of the jar. We have our boiling
brine and that's going to be the next thing
that we do
is put the brine over our cucumbers that are in the jars. 
And to do that we're
going to use some canning tools. 
We have a funnel.
We have what we call a bubble freer. And
a bubble freer is just a plastic, we call
it a plastic wand, and this goes down the
side of your jar to get the bubbles out. And
then this one actually has a jagged edge that
measures the head space. And the head space
is the amount of space that's between the
top of the food and the top of the jar. And
so if you remember, I said a half inch head
space is what we want and we measure that
on the side of our jar. The other tools we
have are a magnetic wand which we'll use in
a minute for our lids and then a jar lifter.
And the jar lifter is used to put our jars
in and out of the boiling water bath pot.
And we have our water bath pot on the stove
with the water getting ready to boil. So lets
put our broth into our jars.
And again, we're going to fill this within
a half inch of the top.
We'll fill it and then we're going to use
our bubble freer and go down the side of our
jars and get those extra bubbles out of there.
If we don't do that, we'll end up with more
food and less liquid. And we want to make
sure we have liquid to the top of our jar.
Okay, now we're ready for our lids. Before
we put our lids on, we want to wipe the top
of our jars because we don't want any food
or a sugary syrup between our jar top and
our lid. We want to make a really good seal.
And we had our lids on the stove.
There in a pan of water just simmering. And
what that does is it softens that inner seal
and makes a good seal when you do the canning
process. 
And this is our magic wand and it keeps you from burning your fingers.
And then you're going to put the jar lid with the jar rim on.
When we put this jar rim on, we put
it just until it catches and then finger tip
tight. We don't want to crank that lid on
there because we'll put a bind between the
lid and the jar ring and it could cause it
not to seal.
We process our pickles in a hot boiling water
bath for 10 minutes. Then we let them set
for 12-24 hours. When that process is done,
then you can check and make sure that they're
safe to keep. And you push in the center of
each of the jar lids. If they stay down that
means they're good.
Label them and date them. Most of our canned
goods are good to keep for a year. Make sure
that when you're canning foods that you use
a USDA approved recipe. And those can be found
along with the recipe that we have for today's
pickles at fcs.osu.edu and click on the home
food preservation tab.
