Philip’s Famous Pickles: A Santa Clarita Kitchen Finds Its Brine
· @Philip
Tangy, salty and barely sweet, built on raw apple cider vinegar and perfected one quarter-teaspoon at a time. Here is the recipe, and how it came to be.
How the brine got made
It started on a Monday evening with 27 ounces of cucumbers, a pouch of Mrs. Wages Bread & Butter mix, and a jar of Ball Pickle Crisp. The pouch is written for a 10-pound harvest and seven quarts. The kitchen had a single pound and a half. So the first job was arithmetic: one-sixth of everything.
The second job was taste. Bread and butter pickles are a sweet pickle by design, seven cups of sugar to the pouch. That was never going to work here. The sugar came down to a quarter of what the label asks, and the brine went the other way: more salt, and citric acid stirred in a quarter-teaspoon at a time, tasted hot off the stove, until it bit back.
The vinegar is Bragg’s raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar with the mother. It is 5% acidity, same as white vinegar, so it cans safely. It turns the brine a deep amber and gives the pickles a rounder, less harsh sour than distilled vinegar does. A little cloudiness in the jar is the mother, and it is harmless.
The first jar came up short on brine and got topped off with a second, smaller batch. The second batch tasted better than the first. The numbers below are that second batch, doubled, and they are the recipe now. A tip for anyone making it: hot brine tastes sharper than the finished pickle will. If it tastes just a touch too sour in the pot, it will be right in a week.
One mistake worth passing along. The first jar was packed with whole cucumbers, and the pouch warns against that in capital letters. A whole cucumber is too dense for the short water-bath time to penetrate, so it cannot be canned safely with this recipe. That jar became a refrigerator pickle instead, which is its own fine thing. Slice them for the shelf, leave them whole for the fridge.
The recipe
Makes two large jars, about two quarts of packed cucumbers.
The brine
| Amount | Ingredient |
|---|---|
| 3¾ cups | Bragg’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar, raw, unfiltered, with the mother (5% acidity) |
| ⅓ cup | Granulated sugar |
| ⅓ cup (5 Tbsp + 1 tsp) | Mrs. Wages Bread & Butter Pickles Mix |
| 5 tsp (1 Tbsp + 2 tsp) | Canning or kosher salt, not iodized table salt |
| 1 Tbsp | Citric acid |
In the jars
| Amount | Ingredient |
|---|---|
| About 3½ lb | Pickling cucumbers (Kirby, 3 to 4 inches), blossom end trimmed, sliced ¼ inch |
| ⅛ tsp per pint, ¼ tsp per quart | Ball Pickle Crisp Granules (calcium chloride), in the bottom of each jar, not in the brine |
Scaling it
| Batch | Vinegar | Sugar | Mrs. Wages mix | Salt | Citric acid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per 1 cup vinegar | 1 cup | 1 Tbsp + 1½ tsp | 1 Tbsp + 1¼ tsp | 1⅓ tsp | ¾ tsp + a pinch |
| This recipe (2 jars) | 3¾ cups | ⅓ cup | ⅓ cup | 5 tsp | 1 Tbsp |
| Full pouch (6 to 7 quarts) | 11¼ cups | 1 cup | 1 whole pouch | 5 Tbsp | 3 Tbsp |
The method
- Ice bath the cucumbers, 3 hours. Wash them. Cut 1/16 inch off the blossom end, the end opposite the stem, and discard it; it carries an enzyme that softens pickles. Slice ¼ inch thick. Cover with ice and cold water. Even 30 minutes helps if you are short on time.
- Start the water bath. Fill your biggest pot with enough water to cover the jars by an inch, with a rack or folded towel on the bottom. Bring it to a boil.
- Wash and heat the jars. Hot soapy water for jars, flat lids and rings. Set the jars, not the lids, in the hot water to warm.
- Make the brine. In a stainless steel or enamel pot, never aluminum, combine the vinegar, sugar, Mrs. Wages mix, salt and citric acid. Medium heat, stirring, until everything dissolves and it just begins to bubble. Turn off the heat.
- Drain the cucumbers. Colander, shake, pick out the ice.
- Pack the jars. Lift one hot jar onto a towel. Drop in the Pickle Crisp. Pack slices firmly, pushing down without crushing, to ½ inch below the rim.
- Pour the brine. Ladle hot brine to ½ inch below the rim. Slide a chopstick down the inside in a few places to release air bubbles; top off if the level drops. Short on brine? Top off with plain hot vinegar.
- Lid them. Wipe each rim with a clean damp paper towel. Flat lid on, ring on, snug like a peanut butter jar and no tighter.
- Process. Lower the jars into the boiling water, upright and not touching, an inch of water over the tops. Once at a full rolling boil, time it: pints 12 minutes, quarts 17 minutes. Those times include the altitude adjustment for the Santa Clarita Valley.
- Rest 5 minutes. Burner off, pot lid off, jars stay in the water.
- Cool 12 to 24 hours. Lift the jars straight up onto a towel. Do not tip, dry or tighten them. The lids ping as they seal.
- Check the seals. Press each lid center. Firm means sealed: date it and shelve it. If it flexes, it did not seal: refrigerate and eat within a week.
- Wait. Edible in 24 hours, best after three to four weeks. Chill before opening. Use within a year.
The refrigerator version. For whole cucumbers, or no canner: pack the jar with Pickle Crisp and cucumbers, pour the hot brine, lid it snug, let it cool on the counter, then refrigerate. No boiling. Slices are ready in three days, whole cucumbers in about ten. They keep a few months and stay the crunchiest of all, but they must stay in the fridge.
What keeps it safe
Home canning is forgiving about flavor and strict about acid. Sugar, salt and citric acid can go up or down to taste. The vinegar cannot. Never add water to the brine and never reduce the vinegar; the acid is what makes a shelf-stable pickle, and the recipe above is already at the edge of sweet. Use vinegar labeled 5% acidity, which Bragg’s is. Use new flat lids every time; rings can be reused. Skip aluminum pots and iodized salt, which darken and cloud the brine. And slice the cucumbers for anything headed to the pantry.
Philip’s Famous Pickles were first canned on October 19, 2026, in Canyon Country. Good Shepherd Media will report back in four weeks on how they turned out.