I’m no stranger to making homemade pickles. From the classic salt pickled ones that take a month in a dark closet to brine, to quick pickles that are good to eat within 24 hours. But, these dill pickled cucumbers are my favourite. They come from Not Just Jam, a cookbook crammed with 94 recipes for classic preserving methods. It’s slow living in a cookbook and it’s my jam to be frank. I love making jams, condiments and pickles – something homemade just tastes better.
Written by Mathew Evens, a farmer, Not Just Jam is an ode to the surplus of the seasons. He eats seasonally and so when life gives you excess rhubarbs and apples and onions – he pickles, jams and preserves them so they can be enjoyed all year long. You don’t need to own an orchard to enjoy this cookbook – all you need is some canning jars, fresh (in season) produce and the patience to wait for the flavours to develop.
Dietary Notes
All recipes are plant-based – with their main ingredient being some sort of fresh produce. The only time you’ll see otherwise is in recipes that utilise an animal product, like the passion fruit curd which uses eggs and butter or the mandarin honey butter which uses butter.
Best For
Those who love slow living and want to learn to (or already do) make their own preserves, jams and pickles.
Cooking Level
Intermediate – advanced: Jamming, preserving and pickling can be quite technical and when done in the old-fashioned correct manner, a small error can lead to an unusable batch. That said, he provides step-by-step instructions so even if you are a beginner you’ll do great.
I’m sharing the recipe for his dill pickled cucumbers which came out phenomenally – crunchy, sweet and tangy. The only change I’ll make next time is adding a whole chilli for heat.
A quick note on the recipe, he didn’t mention removing the onions once they had soaked with the cucumbers, however he never referenced them in the recipe again and the picture looked like there were no onions, so I chose to remove them. I’m sure you can leave them if you want. In addition I halved the sugar as I didn’t want very sweet pickles. He uses 200g, I used 100g.
Homemade Dill Pickled Cucumbers
Equipment
- 2 500 ml jars washed and sterilised
Ingredients
- 600 grams Lebanese / Mediterranean cucumbers very thinly sliced
- 1 brown onion thinly sliced
- 1 ½ tablespoon salt
- 60 ml hot water
- 250 ml white wine vinegar
- 100 grams sugar
- 2 teaspoon brown mustard seeds
- 2-3 tablespoons chopped dill
- ¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
- ¼ teaspoon chilli flakes
Instructions
- In a large nonreactive (glass, ceramic or plastic) bowl, toss the cucumber with onion, salt and hot water and set aside for 3 hours. Drain, reserving the liquid.
- In a medium saucepan, pop the vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds, dill, turmeric and chilli (if using). Bring to a boil over high heat, add the cucumber and its reserved soaking liquid, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 2 minutes.
- Transfer the pickles to sterilised jars. Store for a month in the fridge, ideally, before using to let the flavour develop.
Not Just Jam is published by Murdoch Books and distributed by Jonathan Ball Publishers. It is available here
