Tag: garlic

Thick Sliced Crinkle-Cut Hot Garlic Dill Pickles

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These thick crinkle-cut hot garlic dill pickles turned out great.  These are fresh from the field to the jar. Changes in the recipe explained briefly below also worked out great!  

Osage Farms in Dillard, Georgia is a real find.  When I first realized that the cucumbers they offered were authentically fresh from the field and that they had been picked within the hour, I knew I would have a top quality product to use for my hot garlic dill pickles.  Also offered along with the cucumbers were potatoes, various peppers (hot and mild), beets, peaches, cabbage, tomatoes (very wide variety), various squashes, tender ears of corn, okra, and soon apples.  All of their produce is top quality and fresh.

Recipe Changes

Since this last batch of pickles, prepared this past Saturday, was a fairly small batch of 12 quarts,  I ventured out in my recipe. This time around, I added a more generous portion of powdered cayenne along with a multi-fistful of dried hot chili peppers into the brine mix.  In the jars, to leave more room for pickles, I backed off on the amount of added flaked cayenne and dill.  I did add fresh dill weed sprigs to the jars along with fresh hot chili pepper rings, and whole dried cayenne peppers to the jars before I added the thick sliced, crinkle cut cucumber slices and covered them with the spicy brine. The pickles are not room temperature cured yet, so I have not tried them.  I hope they will be very good.

UPDATE: They are tastier and spicier than ever and the thicker slices make then crunchier.

The Osage Produce Stand is a wonder of fresh goodness in North Georgia close to the North Caroline state line on HWY 441.

The equivalency table I created for making various sized batch of pickles is a big help:

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It’s All Pickle Relish and It’s All Good!

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After a review of various recipes for chow-chow pickle relish and learning that there is no set recipe but more a list of loose guidelines or starting points from which to prepare your own. I realized that there is a great deal of latitude when preparing it. All items should be cut or chopped rather small. About 1/4 inch is about right and even smaller is okay too. In my list below, beans and corn do not need to be modified. The simplest relish can contains just a few of the above ingredients. I know someone who only zuchinni squash cut up into very small pieces for her relish which she called “cha-cha”. I knew right away that there is plenty of freedom to make changes – even in the name itself. So, it seems that pickle relishes not matter what you call them or how you make them evolve over time, but the various base ingredients stay relatively the same.

A list of possible vegetable ingredients for chow-chow:

  • Cabbage – red or green
  • Tomatoes Green or Ripe
  • Onions
  • Cucumbers
  • Squash
  • Bell Peppers – Green, Yellow, Red
  • Hot Peppers – Jalapeno, Serrano, Hot Chili, Tobasco
  • Celery
  • Cooked and Drained Kernel Corn
  • Cooked and Drained Beans – Pinto, White, or Black
  • Cilantro
  • Fresh Garlic Cloves
  • Horseradish (Louisianna Cajun style)

The base liquid is water, vinegar, sugar, and salt.

Along with these 4 main ingredients a variety of spices can be added:

  • Turmeric
  • Cayenne Powder
  • Flaked, Dry Cayenne
  • Garlic Powder
  • Allspice
  • Dry Garlic Flakes
  • Peppercorns – white and/or black
  • Dry Mustard
  • Celery Seeds or Celery Salt
  • Cumin
  • Coriander
  • Bay Leaves
  • Cinnamon

It seems that chutney and picalilli are all cousins to chow-chow and chutney may, in fact, be the parent of the other two. They all contain the same basic pickling “foundation” of water, salt, vinegar, and sweetener (sugar, honey, molasses). The ratios differ, but the base ingredients seem to be the same. There are minor and arguable difference between chow-chow and picalilli. Some say that picalilli has cauliflower and chow-chow does not. Others say that picalilli is cut up much finer than chow-chow. I call these minor differences. Chances are that there was a divide at some point from the original relish. It all may be a choice of name more than anything else.

More on Chutneys

6 Chow-Chow Recipes

2015 Big Batch of Hot Garlic Dills

This batch ended up as 36 quarts.  Here is the breakdown for the batch:

  • 40 pounds of fresh pickling cucumbers
  • Over 15 Quarts of Water
  • Over 25 Cups of Apple Cider Vinegar
  • Over 4 Cups of Salt
  • 2 – 1/4 Cups Dill Seed
  • 4 – 1/2 Cups Garlic Chips
  • 4 – 1/2 Cayenne Flakes
  • Fresh Dill Heads and Tabasco Peppers

Comments: The cucumbers were fresh and excellent in color, shape, and taste.  This seems to be a great year for produce in general. Since there was very little waste, I packed these as tightly as possible.
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ULTRA HOT Garlic Dills

I had some pickling solution leftover when making the regular batch of hot garlic dills along with some cucumbers. I located several more jars and decided to pump up the heat.  I added powdered cayenne to the pickling solution and added dried red hot chilies to the jar.  They are not too hot, but they are a bit spicier than the regular hot garlic dills.  The taste is still real good!