Pickling cucumbers

[rob the roller]

I am getting a glut of cucumbers and would like to pickle some of them. I have seen recipes posted that require them to be sliced and salted. I want to cut them into manageable chunks, then preserve them sweet and sour and little spicy. Does anyone have a recipe for this, or could anyone suggest how it might be done? Most of the recipes I have seen call for heavy salting. I tried this last year, and we are still trying to finish the damn things, mainly by adding them to various recipes as a salt substitute. They also make an excellent sauce tartar substitute (if used in minute quantities) but that's not why we pickled them. If pickled cucumbers are any good, should not last the month. All responses gratefully received.

Thank you

Rob

[rustylady]

You could pickle cucumbers in chunks - no reason why not. You add salt to draw out some of the water, so the pickling mixture can be absorbed into your veg - but you should then rinse the salt off with plenty of clean water. This gets rid of the salty taste.

[Alison]

As said above the reason you salt is to bring out the water so that it doesn't dilute the vinegar too much and ensure proper preservation. I did some last year and have some salting at the moment but you do have to give them a good rinse before you pickle otherwise you'll be left with a salty taste. The ones I did last year were just pickled on their own in spicy vinegar. This year I'm using a NT recipe which also adds sliced onion and green peppers (and green chillies in my case as I thought it would be nice). No idea what it'll taste like but it sounded good and I wanted to use the recipe