Using smaller sizes of pickling cucumbers will help greatly. This will improve texture. What pickle recipes are you using? I make a delicious icebox pickle. It's my favorite and the favorite here of anyone who eats them.

This year I bought bags of "pickling cucumbers" from one of our local farmers. They were NOT pickling cukes but older cukes and they made soft, horrible pickles. So another suggestion is to look for fresh cucumbers.

Agree that #1 issue is to use only pickling cucumbers and they need to be as fresh-picked as possible and evenly sliced - even waffle sliced. Those two things make a world of difference in both appearance and taste.

As to packing the jars, some use a wooden mallet to smash pack the jars. I don't recommend it because the resulting pickles are smashed too. Using the wide-mouth jars helps, they pack easier and more evenly. Making sure the cuke slices are well heated before packing helps keep them from floating OR make them well ahead of time if cold packed so they have time to settle.

Add bits of color improves appearance too - pieces of bright red or yellow peppers - sweet or hot depending on the taste you are after. Heads of dill as well as whole garlic cloves in the jar rather than bits and pieces looks better too.

Hope this helps.

Dave

It's all about appearance. Pickling cukes are smaller and firmer. They have delicate skins.

I am in favor of hand-slicing (or a mandoline) as you get more consistent slices, but I realize with younger children that may not be possible or safe. If using a food processor, select out the best slices and focus on a few "show" jars for the batch.

Make sure headspace is exact and there are no bubbles. Allow enough time before showing to be sure jars are sealed and if some pickles are floating that there's enough time to turn jars and let the slices sink as much as possible.

Check every rule. For example, typically a Ball jar needs to have a Ball lid. Using a Kerr lid would lose you points. If Ball is a sponsor, use Ball products.

Carol

Dave and Carol pretty much have it covered (you also knew where you needed to improve). If you want to branch out from cukes try pickled peppers - I didn't enter them, but made a mix of red and green whole jalapenos last year that looked very pretty. Use whole spices not ground, whole bay leaves not pieces, pickling salt not regular salt, and even though you may not prefer it for taste, distilled white vinegar or white wine vinegar for color/clarity.

I find that using regular-mouth jars allows me to wedge the pickles (esp. whole) in a little so they don't float as much. Put the spices in, then the cukes. Just line them up, stem ends up, so they're orderly (none going across), packing the outside ring first and then filling in the middle tight of enough that nothing floats but you can still get brine down in and of course look for uniformly sized cukes. Slices are tougher to make look pretty. Good luck next year!

"What pickle recipes are you using? I make a delicious icebox pickle."

We used some package mixes from Ball that we bought at the store.

"I am in favor of hand-slicing (or a mandoline) as you get more consistent slices, but I realize with younger children that may not be possible or safe."

The kids did use a knife but I am thinking I will buy a mandoline slicer for next year, I have been looking at the Bron models which would allow us to make waffle type slices. Does anyone know if this is a good choice? Any other suggestions as to slicers?

"Make sure headspace is exact and there are no bubbles."

A few questions in regards to this...does headspace change? It seems like several of the jars that we saw that did well at the State Fair didn't have as much water in them as I would have expected, it must soak into the pickles over time? Question 2, is the best way to check head space a little plastic tool or something else? Also is it possible to get out all of the bubbles? We really tried but still had some and it seemed like most every jar we looked at when we were at the fair had bubbles.

Thanks for all of the help

Waffle slices would be very pretty but still harder to pack than whole cukes.

I never notice as much headspace change in pickles as jams/jellies (as the gel sets it settles on me) though I am sure the cukes soak it up, I think they swell so it ends up about the same as you started.

Yes, there is a little plastic tool Ball sells in a kit with their jar lifter and funnel, you can use one end to poke around and get bubbles out (or use a plastic picnic knife or a chopstick), the other end is notched so you can set it on the rim and check headspace - 1/4" or 1/2".

Did the winning pickles have bubbles in the jars?

Good recommendations. I do a rip of pickles each year and did some up special this year because I had tinkered with entering some stuff in our county fair and it would have been done up a bit differently than I normally do my own.

I agree that using white vinegar is important for appearance on pickles. One does not want cloudy sediment on the bottom, either. When I do my own, I use apple cider vinegar but it makes a difference in clarity. So does not using salt with iodine in it.

It's VERY important to use the proper cuke for pickles both for appearance and for just general appropropriate size and texture. It's easy enough to Google pickling cukes to make a choice so I won't go into it much. There are even special cukes specifically for making Gherkins.

One wants to pick these cukes young. If you are doing sliced pickles it makes a lot of difference in every respect. Young means tiny seeds, almost transparent and not a lot of 'gel' around them. Picking them young also translates into firmer flesh consistently through the fruit, but not 'tougher'. If you are doing whole pickles, you want each fruit to be of a consistant size! If you are doing slice, consistency also matters both in diameter and width of slice.

Whole pickles look great carefully stacked on end. Yes, you will see that done for fair, even down to greenbeans. Even labeling is important. Many of our 4-H'ers cut gingham circles to lay over the lid and under the band and pink around the edges.

You may even want to plant a mess of your own pickling cukes (can be done in urns, even) to get just the right variety. Don't go to salad cukes, it's for desperate circumstances. LOL. I've done it just to use them up, but it doesn't make prize-winning results.

And most of all is brickle. My mother used that word to describe what a pickle should be. So crisp it snaps. What does that have to do with appearance? Well, you can tell on sliced pickles whether the slices 'flop' and bend. The slice on a good pickle will hold it's plate-like shape. I've done it with ice and brine, but pickle crisp works too.

It sounds like a lot of work, but if you do pickles routinely, it's just part of the pickle program and doing each little step the right way is as easy as the wrong way.