Almost every family makes preparations for the winter every year. Usually this involves canning and pickling vegetables, making berries into jam, and much more. Preparing cucumbers with a candle for the winter is an original, simple, quick way of preservation that helps preserve all the benefits and freshness of vegetables, but it also has disadvantages. The finished product is suitable for salads and various snacks.
Features of preparing cucumbers with a candle for the winter
Immediately before harvesting, you need to study some of the features inherent in this method.These include the correct selection of vegetables.
Cucumbers should be:
- Fresh. When buying cucumbers, pay attention to the whole batch, rather than choosing one piece at a time. So, if a few specimens are not fresh, then all the others will soon begin to wither and deteriorate.
- Before putting cucumbers in a jar, under no circumstances should they be washed. If the outer layer is washed off, the rotting process will begin, and no workpiece will be made. Cucumbers must be dry and clean. It's best to just wipe them with a cloth.
- Cucumbers must remain intact. It is important to look not at the batch as a whole, but at each cucumber separately. Such meticulousness is necessary; if one cucumber spoils, all the others will soon spoil.
If the choice is between greenhouse and ground varieties, preference should be given to the latter. Greenhouse cucumbers have a thin top layer that peels off easily and the vegetables begin to deteriorate.
Advantages and disadvantages of the method
This method of harvesting cucumbers has its advantages and disadvantages.
The advantages include:
- unchanged taste and almost complete preservation of nutritional value;
- cucumbers remain fresh due to the fact that there is no temperature treatment;
- The shelf life of such cucumbers is long, about 3-4 months;
- does not require large amounts of time and money.
There are much fewer disadvantages:
- if you select cucumbers inattentively and a spoiled specimen ends up in the jar, all the vegetables will be spoiled;
- When the jars are exposed to light, the cucumbers also spoil.
Specifics of product selection and preparation
Before harvesting cucumbers, they must be properly selected and prepared.If you use cucumbers from your own garden, it is better to pick them in the morning or evening, and not at the peak of solar activity. After harvesting, place the vegetables in the shade. During active fruiting, they are collected once every 2 days, and sometimes daily.
It is important to prevent the cucumbers from overripening and becoming covered with a yellow coating. It is best to prepare recently picked cucumbers; if they lie at room temperature for even 2 days, their freshness and healthy appearance will disappear, and their shelf life will be significantly reduced.
Preparing cucumbers for placing in jars is a simple matter. They are simply sorted, the fruits of the required size are separated and damaged or deformed specimens are removed.
The shape of the cucumbers is also important; it is desirable that they be almost identical.
How to properly prepare containers
It’s easy to prepare a container for preparing cucumbers with a candle. The jars are disinfected, preferably heated in a water bath. To do this, you need to pour 1 cm of water into a pan, put a wooden grate on the bottom, and place a jar on this grate. Bring the water to a boil and keep it in the jar for another 10 minutes.
After this procedure, the container becomes suitable for harvesting cucumbers.
How to close cucumbers with a candle?
The procurement process itself looks like this:
- Cucumbers of approximately the same size are selected.
- Selected clean and dry cucumbers are placed in a pre-sterilized jar. Do not fill completely; you need to leave room for a candle.
- A candle is placed on top and lit.
- The jar closes after the air is completely released, and the candle goes out.
How and for how long can preserves be stored?
Cucumbers preserved in a jar with a candle are stored for 3-4 months. Due to the fact that a certain vacuum is created in the jar, the vegetables remain fresh and retain all their nutritional value.
In order to increase the shelf life of preservation, the jars are placed in cool and dry rooms where heat will not penetrate.
Places where you should not store canned food are the kitchen, rooms that are very heated, places near heaters. Otherwise, the cans will heat up and explode. If this does not happen, then the condition of the vegetables will not be the best; most likely they will soften and become flabby and tasteless.
