For preserving a 1 litre jar of cucumbers or green tomatoes you need about 1/2 litre of salt water, so I am going to write the ingredients that you need for that. The quantity of cucumbers or tomatoes really depends on the size. You don’t actually need that much and is very simple to do. It takes about 3 weeks for the pickles to be done, but if you put them somewhere in the sun it takes even less, about 2 weeks.

Ingredients

• cucumbers/green tomatoes (to fit in a 1 litre jar)
• 1/2 litre water
• 30g salt
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
• 1 bayleaf
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 teaspoon dry thyme
• 1 teaspoon mustard seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• a few slices of horseradish root

Directions

Boil the water with the salt and the bayleaf and let it cool down.

In the meantime, put the cucumbers or the tomatoes in the jar and add all the other ingredients. One important thing to do here, if you pickle tomatoes, pierce them a few times.

When the water is not hot anymore, add it to the jar.

That’s it!

Tips

The cucumbers pickle better if they are whole, they don’t absorb that much salt. There are many types of pickling cucumbers out there, I tried a few times with Straight Eight cucumbers of medium size, and it went really well.

Green tomatoes can be quite small, you can even use cheery type tomatoes. The only requirement really is that they are not close to been ripe, and quite hard. This way they won’t get soft when pickled.