Easy, Peasy Pickles

Soon, your friend’s farm, area produce stands and neighbors’ (or yours!) backyard gardens will be brimming with homegrown cucumbers. And if you’ve got cucumbers, you can soon and without too much effort, have pickles.

Quick refrigerator pickles are the easy path to pickle pleasure. You can take the cooked and canned route, but if you’re a pickle lover and plan to plow through them pretty fast, try this method that promises perfectly tangy, salty, garlicky goodness in only 24 hours.

Perfect Pickles

• 14 small cucumbers or 7 medium/large cucumbers cut into spears
• 40 sprigs of fresh dill
• 1 large onions, sliced thin
• 5 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
• 2 large jalapeno peppers, sliced thin crosswise
• 1 1/2 teaspoons pickling spices
• 1 quart of white vinegar
• 1/2 cup of canning salt
• 1 quart of water

Put cucumbers in big, heatproof glass bowl. Add the dill, onion, peppers, garlic and spices.

In a large saucepan, combine the water, vinegar and salt and bring to a boil. Cook and stir until salt is dissolved.

Pour the boiling liquid over the cucumber mixture let cool completely. Then cover the bowl and refrigerate for 24 hours.

Store the pickles in the bowl or in smaller jars in the fridge for up to two weeks.

Pickle Primer
The secret to pickles is osmosis, the scientific reaction that creates pickles in the first place. It sounds odd: Oz-mo-sis. But you likely learned all about it in middle school biology. Here’s a refresher. "Osmosis is the net movement of solvent molecules through a partially permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, in order to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides." It happens everywhere, including in our bodies. But for pickles, think of it as the flavor delivery system. When you put vegetables in a salty brine, the water inside the vegetables flows out into the brine, making the pickles crunchier, while the seasonings in the brine soak into the veggie’s flesh. This passage of water occurs because of the tendency of substances to move through a membrane — like a cucumber skin — from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration (osmosis!). In this case, the salty brine solution has a lower water concentration than the water inside fresh vegetables, so water will flow out of the vegetables.