You will find that making your own pickles is easy, quick, and tastier than any store-bought pickles. Homemade refrigerator pickles are crispy, you can tweek the recipe to your liking, and they make a great snack whenever you feel like having something with a little kick.
I have been making homemade pickles for a couple of years now, and have modified the original recipe to my taste. You can make them a little spicier by adding dried red peppers, a little more or less tart depending on the amount of vinegar and salt you put in the brine, you could add natural sugar to make them sweet, and you can also grind them up to make relish. There is no canning process used with refrigerator pickles - once you are done mixing everything together and putting it in the jar, all you have to do it put them in the fridge. They will be ready to eat in a few days and will last up to a month in the fridge, and after you eat all the pickles, you can use the pickle juice/brine as a marinade for steak or chicken, so nothing is really wasted. So many different things you can do. You can find the smaller pickles used for pickling at any grocery store, or better yet, grow your own. A word about salts. In many pickle recipes, it will call for Kosher or Canning/Pickling Salt. Kosher salt is coarser than canning/pickling salt and some brands contain an anti-caking agent (yellow prussiate of soda) but unlike the anti-caking additive in table salt, it doesn't cloud pickling liquids. Canning/Pickling salt is similar to table salt, but lacks the iodine and anti-caking additives that turn pickles dark and the pickling liquid cloudy. Pickles made with table salt would still be good to eat, but they wouldn't look as appetizing.
Here is the recipe I use to make Refrigerator Dill Pickles:
1 Bunch Fresh Dill
4-5 Cloves Garlic
Mini Cucumbers (about 9 will fit in a 1.5 quart canning jar)
3 TBSP Pickling Spice
1 tsp Italian Spices
3 Cups Water
6 TBSP White Vinegar
3 TBSP Canning/Pickling Salt
Wash pickles thoroughly and place in clean glass jar (could be a large canning jar, or a pickle jar that was used for store-bought pickles). You can put the pickles in whole, cut them up into long spears, or slice them):
Pour in your spices, and place the fresh dill in the jar over the pickles:
Mix water, vinegar, and salt in a pitcher, stirring briskly until all the salt is dissolved. This only takes a minute or two. (If you want, you can heat the water and pour in the salt so it will dissolve, but then you have to cool it down before pouring in your vinegar). This makes the 'brine' (which is salty solution):
Pour the brine over the pickles, place a lid on the jar (you may want to shake the jar a few times to distribute the spices) and put in the fridge:
The pickles will be ready to eat in a few days. The longer they sit, the more flavor they soak up from the spices...
