Cucumber pickles for the winter - canning small-sized vegetables. In one jar they can cover the gherkins, onions, baby tomatoes, small ears of corn or individual grains, green peas, green beans, also called “picks”.
Cooks from America always add such preservation to sandwiches. Vegetables make an excellent appetizer for side dishes and meat; pickles go well with any potato dish.
Required Products
The ingredients for this recipe are sufficient to can approximately 4 quart jars.
Components:
- Vegetables: 25 pcs.gherkins, 30 pcs. Cherry tomatoes, 1 head of cauliflower, 15 small carrots (about 3 - 5 cm in length), 300 g of small onions.
- Peppercorns - 10 pcs.
- Coriander - 20 grains.
Now let’s look at what and how to do to have a delicious cucumber snack on the table in winter.
Rules for choosing vegetables
To make everything look appetizing and original in the jars, you should buy assorted vegetables of the same size. The cucumbers should be about the size of your little finger. This appetizer is prepared from overgrown cucumbers for the winter, but the vegetables are then cut into bars. Cherry tomatoes do not have to be red - tomatoes come in yellow, pink, and striped.
It is not always possible to find small carrots on the market, so you can take a regular-sized root vegetable and cut it into small bars. You can buy cabbage not only white, but also purple. Pickled pickles in a jar are alternated in layers, focusing on the color scheme. It turns out quite bright and original. To make the pickles crispy, place peeled horseradish at the bottom of the jar. It is better to use jars for pickles with a capacity of 1.5 - 2 liters — This makes it more convenient to arrange the vegetable layers.
Canning steps
It is necessary to follow the recipe at all stages of canning vegetables for the winter. First, the vegetables are washed and the stalks are cut off. Dense root vegetables are peeled, and cauliflower is divided into bunches. At the preparatory stage, it is necessary to sterilize the jars.
Before pickling large root vegetables, they are cut into circles or slices approximately the same size as vegetables that will be canned whole. Prepared products are poured into separate bowls for convenience.
It is advisable to trim the ends of cucumbers.Lightly boil carrots and cabbage (blanch). You can separate all the inflorescences from cabbage. Large carrots are cut into thick rings or into 4 parts.
Blanching is carried out by lowering a colander with vegetables into boiling water. A 5-minute boil is enough for the vegetables to reach the required condition, and after cooking they are crunchy when bitten.
Before storing in sterilized jars, the vegetables are placed in separate containers, and then the housewife places them in layers one by one. It is advisable to alternate products of contrasting shades so that the canned assortment has an interesting color pattern.
For example, you can put a layer of zucchini on the bottom, and then lay out cherry tomatoes, place white cabbage on top, the next layer you can choose carrots or pickles, etc.
Pouring boiling water
Filled jars to the top are filled with boiling water. To prevent the glass from cracking when pouring hot water, the container is first filled to about 1/3 of the capacity, and after half a minute the water is added almost to the neck.
Warming up in the oven
After filling the jars of pickles with boiling water for the winter, according to the recipe, cover with a lid and place in the oven to heat. It is preheated to 100 degrees and the jars in which pickles are pickled for the winter are kept there for 15 minutes. After this, the water is drained and the jars are covered with a warm towel so that the containers do not cool down while the marinade is being prepared.
Preparing the marinade
The next step in this preservation is to prepare the liquid to marinate the pickles. The brine is prepared from the water that was poured from jars of canned vegetables.The following ingredients are added per 1 liter of boiling water: 50 g each of salt and sugar, 10 black peppercorns, 20 coriander grains.
The brine is boiled on the stove until the salt and sugar crystals dissolve in the water. At the end of cooking, add vinegar to the pan and cover with a lid to prevent the acid from evaporating. If desired, table vinegar can be replaced with apple or wine vinegar. After boiling, the ingredients are boiled in the marinade for 2-3 minutes, then poured into jars with vegetables.
The process of sterilizing jars of vegetables
The pickle preparations for the winter are covered with lids (not hermetically sealed) and placed on a baking sheet in the oven. The temperature of ovens with an appropriate regulator is set to 200 degrees. The jars should be kept in the oven until air bubbles appear from the day of the jars. This indicates that the boiling process has begun. From now on, you need to set a timer for 20 minutes. Afterwards, the containers are removed and hermetically sealed using a special key, and the lids for jars with threads (twist-off) are simply turned until they stop.
You can prepare preserves without sterilization. In this case, the jars are filled with boiling water 2–3 times. Now you know how to cook pickles.
To determine the tightness of the sealed lid, place the jar of preserved food on a flat table surface and observe whether a chain of air bubbles appears in the jar. In this case, you need to turn the sealing key again or tighten the twist-off cap more tightly.
Preservation with pickles is kept indoors until it cools completely, and then the preparations are lowered into the basement or transferred to the pantry for storage. Pickled vegetables are ready to eat after 1 - 1.5 months, completely soaked in the marinade.
