Will you please stop erasing my posts? Good luck with your cherries, I'm a friend not a foe.

There was a dill pickle recipe posted here long ago. The pickles tasted like Claussen's. It was for a small patch of home grown cucs and you added them as you got them. Anyone out there remember that one? Opps....Guess I posted in the wrong place. This post was edited by beebonnet on Sat, Jul 26, 14 at 18:50

Picking tomatoes in the dark is a hit and miss affair to avoid the green ones. However, at this time of year, I would not expect many green ones and all of them should be brought in since a little cold nip at night ends the plant anyway.

We'll have to try it out. The vinegar, lowers the ph lessening the chance of harmful bacterial growth and has nothing to do with the fermentation process like you said. I'm guessing with enough vinegar added, it could stop the natural fermentation process that occurs with the cucumber, salt, and bacteria reaction, or at the least slow it down. I can taste the difference between a fermented pickle and a vinegar one that hasn't really undergone any fermentation, and I gotta say some recipes indeed fermented. Was really hard to tell if it occurred with the blue ribbon ones because they were so vinegary, and like you said the sugar balances out that vinegar, which is probably what the blue ribbon one is missing, that and possibly not enough vinegar. My personal take on this all now is that without enough vinegar added, they are actually undergoing a fermentation process, and the trick is to add enough vinegar so that the fermentation wont occur, or is slowed down, which results in a different tasting pickle, but stops the fermentation process all together, and could potentially last longer. A proper canning technique would also kill all bacteria, and they wouldn't undergo any fermentation either, I'd imagine. 1 thing about that recipe you linked to, is they did another step, which is they let it set in salt water to draw out the extra moisture, which would help keep them crispier and also keep the ph down from any water in the pickles being released over time as they aged, that does seem like an excessive amount of vinegar tho, you only need to add so much before it becomes acidic, after that threshold is met, I'm not really sure what it's doing other then flavoring them. Next time I open a jar of pickles I'll test the ph levels and see if their in a harmful area, they aren't spoiling tho, it's just like I said, they are over fermenting or over pickling and taking on too much flavors as they age. Another thing I'm curious about now, is if cucumbers can still ferment, in an acidic ph range, because if that's the case, there's nothing really stopping it from occurring, other then using a proper canning technique that ensures everything is killed. Actually I just checked, and the bacteria associated with cucumber fermentation is apparently tolerant to the acidic ph range, so the fermentation process theoretically could still occur despite the ratio of vinegar used. Ph range just gets the pickles out of the harmful bacterial zone, doesn't actually stop the fermentation process, I guess a proper canning technique would help right, Well I think this thread is solved. Thanks for your help.