Sweet and Sour Cucumber Pickle for Hamburger and Sandwich: Recipe

List of ingredients

and aromatics:

recipe

Summary of the recipe

Sliced ​​cucumbers are drained, then placed in jars with herbs and covered with boiling sweet vinegar.

Choose very fresh cucumbers: directly from the garden (cucumber cultivation is easy and often very generous) or failing that, from the market, from a local grower if possible; it makes a difference in taste and crunch.

Also, prefer cucumbers that are not too thick: it is better if they still do not contain seeds.

Drain the cucumber

Wash the cucumbers and then cut them into slices 2 to 4 mm thick

Put them in a colander

Sprinkle with coarse salt, not too much; this salt will make the cucumber gooey.

We let these cucumber slices drain for 1 or 2 hours, their water dripping under the colander. Be careful, they should not be left in the salt for more than 2 hours, because they lose too much water and dry out unpleasantly in the pickle.

The cucumber pieces are then rinsed under the tap to remove all salt residue. This is an essential step to avoid having overly salty pickles.

Prepare condiments

Chop the onion or chives.

Cut the pepper small and cut into small sections

Prepare 5 to 10 peppercorns per jar

Clean the jars well

For about 200 g of cucumber prepare 1 or 2 jars that close well (recovered from preserves or jam, with the lid not twisted). The jar and its lid should be perfectly clean: fresh from the dishwasher or even better, rinsed in boiling water, not completely sterilized, but almost.

packaged

At the bottom of the pot, put 1 to 2 cm of seasonings, place the slices on top, relatively rows to put as much as possible.

Feel free to add a little more onion, pepper and chilli in the middle, then fill to within 1.5cm of the edge.

Prepare the sweet and sour vinegar and cover the future pickles with it

In a saucepan, heat 250 g of vinegar with 50 g of sugar.

As soon as the sugar has melted and is boiling, immediately pour in the cucumbers, filling them almost to the brim: no slices should protrude from the surface.

Close the jar immediately.

Tips for a successful recipe

Use the pickles

The cucumber pickle recipe is a great way to preserve leftover cucumbers from the garden—cucumbers, when they yield, are generous!

This recipe is also dedicated to those who like to make their own hamburger at home. These sweet and sour cucumber pickles are tender and crunchy, spicy and very slightly spicy, if we add Espelette pepper: they are ideal for a burger, a sandwich, to spice up a salad, to decorate a charcuterie board or just to bite into as an appetizer

Best of all, this recipe is simple and easy!

conservation

Preservation in vinegar is an ancient method. Here, in this recipe for sweet and sour cucumber marinades, the preservation is done thanks to 3 factors combined:

• the lowest water content of the cucumber you have cut
• the acidity of the vinegar
• the presence of sugar

Tightly sealed jars of these pickled cucumbers can be stored as pickles, for over a year away from light.

Once opened, like pickles, they will keep in the fridge, usually eaten within a few weeks, if possible. Although, even opening the jar, as long as the discs do not overflow the surface, not much happens.

Trick: you can make jars of different sizes to adapt the amount of pickle to your consumption and according to the use you make.

Obviously, there are many possible variations of this recipe.

The shape of the cucumber pieces:

If the slice is perfect for putting on a hamburger, sandwich or toast, cutting the cucumber into long sticks can be interesting for other uses, in fact the thicker pieces provide more crunch. For example :

• to serve as an appetizer
• in a salad or vegetable bowl, chopsticks are more practical for dicing
• instead of pickles

The spices

The herbs can also vary: you can remove the pepper if you are too sensitive, or add many other flavors:

• there are different types of pepper, and some bring a particular flavor.
• fresh aromatic herbs: thyme, dill, tarragon…
• seeds: cumin, fennel, coriander…

The vinegar

Here we use a white kitchen vinegar, which reveals the color of the pickles better, but other vinegars, colored or less neutral, can be used, such as cider vinegar, for example.

sugar

You can use white, brown, beet or cane sugar. You can even replace it with honey.

It is also possible to pickle cucumber in vinegar and without sugar.

So it’s up to you how you flavor the cucumber pickles. The basic recipe here is excellent. If you are testing variations, avoid changing too many parameters at once. Start by trying different herbs – it’s amazing how a simple fennel leaf in the jar subtly changes the taste of these pickles!

Thank you Vronique MACRELLE