Today Rachel shares a easy pickle recipe and shows you how to make your own live fermented pickles:

Got a mason jar? Some cucumbers? Some salt?

Hey now – you’re in good shape! Here’s how to make live fermented pickles the easy way.

Rachel’s Easy Pickle Recipe

Ingredients:

Cucumbers

Non-iodized salt (though iodized will still work)

Turmeric

Water

Other spices if desired

Directions:

Pick some fresh cucumbers and slice them into quarters. Rachel cuts both ends off. Add slices to a clean mason jar, along with fresh grated turmeric or turmeric powder (for color and health). You can also add dill, black pepper, mustard seed or other herbs and spices you think would make the mix delicious. Now make a brine with one pint of water and 1.5 tablespoons of salt. Pour the brine over the cucumber slices, covering them, then cap the jar with a rusty lid. If you don’t have an awful-looking rusty lid, use a nice lid. Now shake the jar well. Once shaken, loosen the lid to allow gasses to escape during fermentation. Leave jar on counter for a few days, occasionally tasting a slice of cucumber. When they taste nice and sour, they’re done!

Notes on Making Live Fermented Pickles

You can put your pickles in the fridge to slow fermentation once they reach a good flavor. They’ll keep for a long time. If you have larger cucumbers, we recommend upping the salt content. If you live in an area with colder temperatures, fermentation takes longer. Just keep tasting. Traditional fermenting is fun and good for you. If you can’t make this easy pickle recipe, well, might as well pick up some of those scary yellow-green things floating like manatees in jars of dead vinegar and preservatives.

As Rachel notes in the video, if the cucumbers turn to mush, you’ll know if something has gone wrong with your fermentation. We’ve never had that happen unless we fail to add enough salt, however. Salt is like magic. It allows the good organisms to thrive and keeps the dangerous ones from making you sick. Remember how our ancestors used to pack barrels of sauerkraut and salt pork? You can eat these things without getting ill because salt keeps them safe. There is no danger in fermenting foods on the counter because salt is a powerful preservative.

Finally, Rachel’s easy pickle recipe uses ivy gourd pickles, AKA the perennial cucumber, AKA Coccinea grandis.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BYic5KZHyjh/?taken-by=david_t_good

The recipe works just the same with other cucumbers, though if they’re big you might want to add more salt.

Homemade pickles are the best – we eat ours every day when we have them. The probiotics are very similar to yogurt. Enjoy!