Half-sour pickles in a quart jar

Half-sours stay on the counter for a few days, not a few weeks. I dissolved salt in water for a brine, trimmed the blossom ends off the cucumbers, and stood them up in a quart jar with garlic and a flowering dill head.

The cucumbers wanted to float, so a small glass lid from a spare jar held them under the brine. By day two the brine was cloudy. That cloudiness is the culture doing its work.

I tasted one on the evening of day three. It was still crisp, garlicky, and only partly sour, so the jar went into the fridge to slow down. That is the pickle in the video: a weekend pickle, not a pantry pickle.

Next time I will pack two jars and leave one a day longer, so the video can cut between them.