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Yesterday I made 18lbs of pickles using 9lbs of cucumbers from the garden and wrote a post about it. Today I decided to move them to jars, and see if I could seal them with the vacuum sealer. First, I put them all into jars. I decided to do this in my workshop, because cleanup would be a lot easier than in the kitchen. Of course I used fresh utensils and clean jars when doing so.

It took ten quart sized jars, filled to the brim, to contain them. The ones I filled from near the bottom of the bags tended to have a lot more of the seeds and dill pieces in them, those are probably going to be the best ones. The one in the front center has tons of the flavorful seeds and such in it. I tried to mix them up well, but they still tended to settle near the bottom of the bag pretty quickly.

These jars have traditional two piece lids, where you have the actual lid and a band that screws on to hold it down. You typically boil the jars with the lids on and band loose for ten minutes or so to create a proper seal. You know the seal is good when the lid no longer moves and is sucked down onto the jar – allowing you to remove the band completely, and still have to pry the lid to get it off. Another way, though possibly not as good, is to put them in a chamber vacuum sealer and do the same process. Unfortunately, these jars are too tall to fit in mind and close the hood, so I decided to try laying them down. I added the lid and tightened the bands until the jars only had a slow drip when laid on their sides. Then, on a bed of paper towels, I vacuumed two jars at a time to remove the air and create a seal. Each jar seemed to create a good enough seal to prevent the lid from moving or being easily removed, even without the bands.

Now they’re in the fridge for storage, and should last a lot longer than they would have otherwise.

A couple weeks ago, I picked some cucumbers that ended up being around 4lbs after discarding the ends and slicing. I split them between two bags, and made approximately eight pounds of pickles. They were a hit, not only with us, but some friends who came over, and we’ve wiped out half so far. The other half is about to be divvied up and given away.

The problem is that our garden is producing far more cucumbers than we can manage. I’ve been giving several away to neighbors, but decided to keep this week’s harvest which came in around 9lbs. I think this may be one of the last harvests we’ll have around this size, because it looks like our cantaloupe have began choking the cucumber out, and since I prefer cantaloupe to cucumber, I’m not doing much to stop it.

Anyway, I started off with these raw cucumbers. I didn’t weigh them. A few have been in the fridge for the last four or five days, so they were getting to where they needed immediate attention.

I sliced the cucumbers with my handy mandolin from Amazon. This thing is great, and if you don’t have one, I recommend picking one up. I don’t usually use the finger guard, especially with cucumbers, but I suppose I should recommend that you do.

This is what the above produced after processing. This is something like an 18″ pizza pan, piled 6″ or so high.

I started filling 10″ x 13″ bags, 3lbs to a bag. This was a mistake, but more on that later.

I needed another pound or so of cucumbers to fill the last bag, so I ran back out to the garden and found these hiding under some leaves.

Here are the three bags, each filled with three pounds of raw, sliced cucumbers. There are two varieties (if the seed company is to be trusted) in there.

I realized at this point that I ran out of dill, so I ordered some from Amazon and had it delivered about an hour later. They source these things from Sprout’s market around here. I’ve used the pre-packaged dill that HEB sells in the past, so my recipe called for an entire bunch of dill per bag, but these were much, much larger. I decided to use two bunches instead of three for the 9lbs of raw cucumbers.

I then mixed the brine. The recipe I concocted for this batch is as follows:

• 7 cups Distilled white vinegar
• 9 cups Cups hot water
• 1 cups, 3 Tbsp Cane sugar
• 6 Tsp Kosher salt
• 6 Tsp Mustard seeds
• 6 Tsp Coriander seeds
• 6 Tsp Dill seeds
• 9 lbs Sliced cucumbers
• 3 Bunches Coarsely chopped dill
• 3 Tbsp Chopped garlic

I mixed it in a pitcher, then divided it among the three bags. This is also where it got kind of messy, because I clumsily knocked one of the bags over and about a cup of brine spilled out. Also, I found that I only had 5 cups of distilled white vinegar, so I substituted apple cider vinegar in for the other two. This is a cold brine recipe, you don’t do any boiling or anything, and I found they come out crispier vs the boiling method I used last year. And they get better as they age.

After filling, I found that the bags were too full to fit into the VacMaster without spilling. I ended up tiling it back on a cardboard box…

… and propping the bags up on cans, in order to keep the liquid from spilling out. Two pounds per bag is what we’ll be doing in the future. I could have redistributed them, but it would have probably been messier.

The finished bags came out at 6.1-6.2Lb each. Roughly 18Lbs total.

I put them in our garage refrigerator to set up. I’ll rotate them a few times to make sure that there is even coverage within the bags, but tomorrow they should be ready to test and distribute into jars. Each 2# (raw) bag from the last batch filled 2 quart mason jars.