Recipes

Half-Sour Pickles

The New York deli 'new pickle' and my summer default — a week in the brine, still bright green all the way through, still audibly crunchy, only mildly sour. It is the same process as a full sour stopped a long way earlier, and the color is how you know: a half-sour has not turned olive yet.

Fermented · Pickled · Vegetable · Snack

Half-Sour Pickles
Prep 30 minutes
Cook 4–7 days
Serves Makes about 3 quarts
Level Easy

The New York deli ‘new pickle’ and my summer default — a week in the brine, still bright green all the way through, still audibly crunchy, only mildly sour. It is the same process as a full sour stopped a long way earlier, and the color is how you know: a half-sour has not turned olive yet.

Ingredients

  • 3 lb small pickling cucumbers, very fresh
  • 1.5 litres water
  • 52 g salt (about a 3.5% brine)
  • 6 garlic cloves, smashed
  • 3 dill heads or 1 Tbsp dill seed
  • 1 tsp black peppercorns
  • 1 tsp coriander seed
  • 2 grape or horseradish leaves

Directions

  1. Key ingredients
  2. Very fresh cucumbers, a lighter brine than a full sour, dill and garlic.
  3. Prep: Trim 1/16 inch off the blossom end of each cucumber — the same rule as Fermented Dill Pickles, Crock, and it matters more here because you are counting on crunch.
  4. Brine lighter: 3.5% rather than 5%. The ferment is short, so it needs less salt covering it, and a lighter brine tastes less salty in a pickle you are eating young.
  5. Pack, brine, weight — everything under the surface.
  6. Ferment 4–7 days at cool room temperature. Taste at day four. You want recognisable cucumber with a sour edge, not full sourness.
  7. Refrigerate as soon as you like it. Cold nearly stops it. These keep a few weeks and will slowly keep souring — which is fine, they are just becoming three-quarter sours.

Notes

PROVENANCE. My own, built to chase the pickles I have eaten in New York delis.

WHY THE LOWER SALT AND SHORTER TIME are a matched pair: less salt means a faster, softer, more fragile ferment with a thinner margin, which is acceptable precisely because you are pulling it at a week and refrigerating. Do not use 3.5% for a batch you intend to leave for a month.

THE VOCABULARY IS DESCRIPTIVE. Half-sour, three-quarter sour and full sour are just how far down the pH curve you stopped. ‘Kosher dill’ in a deli means the garlic-and-dill style, not a religious certification.

STILL OPEN: I have never got a half-sour to hold its snap past about three weeks in the fridge, even cold. If somebody has, I would like to know how.