I love eating, thinking about, and making pickles of all stripes—I’ve read The Joy Of Pickling cover to cover several times—but this summer’s early-onslaught heat in Brooklyn has put me off the sterilizing, hot-packing, and sealing process of proper canned vinegar pickles, and it’s still a little early in the season for the best Kirby cucumbers for fermented crock pickles. The solution—refrigerator pickles—is almost embarrassingly easy: simply pack your vegetables in jars along with spices, pour in your vinegar/water/salt brine solution, and refrigerate. In a day or four, you’ve got pickles.
 

I was extra-impatient for my pickles, so I used very thinly-sliced vegetables. I used my mandoline to get the cucumber slices uniformly thin (do as I say, not as I do: use the hand guard), and combined them in two pint jars with equally thin slices of halved spring onion and strips of a cored and seeded yellow middle-Eastern pepper. I added ¼ tsp fennel seeds, yellow mustard seeds, and pink peppercorns to each jar, then poured over my brine. A handy rule for brine is a 2-to-1 proportion of vinegar and water, and about 1 ½ teaspoons salt per pint jar. For my two pint jars of pickles, I used ¾ cup vinegar, 1 ½ cups water, and 3 teaspoons salt.

 
Because I used such small slices, my pickles were ready in 24 hours—and perfect as an accompaniment with the delicious grilled locally-made sausages I shared at a late lunch with friends. A note about vinegar: since the refrigerator pickles I make are totally raw, I use unpasteurized apple-cider vinegar for my brine. Unpasteurized, naturally fermented apple cider vinegar (the type sold with “the mother”) is loaded with beneficial bacteria and enzymes, and is great for digestion and the immune system.
 
Dula Notes shares a recipe for picnic-ready fresh refrigerator dill spears, spiced up with jalapenos and made fragrant with coriander seeds.
 
Refrigerator pickling isn’t just for cucumbers, though. White On Rice Couple offers a simple recipe for cooling, crunchy Vietnamese-style daikon-and-carrot pickles that uses rice vinegar and a little sugar to enhance the carrots’ natural sweetness.
 
And Martha and Tom have ideas for red cabbage pickled with Chinese five-spice, spicy snap beans with coriander and dill, and cucumbers with caraway.
 
To make things even easier? Once you’ve eaten a batch of your fresh, crunchy refrigerator pickles, you can reuse the brine with more vegetables—just add them to the jar and return to the fridge. Pickles are a refreshing, appetizing, and healthful addition to every summer plate; and with the quick and easy refrigerator technique, they’re only a day away!

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