Quick Refrigerator Pickles
Cucumbers in a hot brine, in the fridge, ready by dinner. Not preserved and not shelf-stable — just crisp, sharp and finished in an afternoon.
Photograph credit: 002 Pickled cucumber by Mushki Brichta · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
What to Put on the Table With Quick Refrigerator Pickles
- A burger or a Reuben
- Cheese and cold cuts
- Fried chicken
How to Cook Quick Refrigerator Pickles
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Wash the cucumbers and trim a thin slice off the blossom end of each — the end opposite the stem. Leave them whole, or cut into spears or 5 mm rounds.
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Pack them upright and tightly into two sterilised 750 ml jars with the garlic, dill, peppercorns, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, chilli flakes and bay leaves distributed between them.
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Put the water, vinegar, salt and sugar in a pan and bring just to a boil, stirring until everything has dissolved.
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Pour the hot brine over the cucumbers to cover them completely, leaving 1 cm of headspace. Tap the jars to release trapped air.
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Seal and leave on the worktop until they reach room temperature, about 45 minutes.
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Refrigerate at least 4 hours before eating. They are good at 4 hours, properly sour at 24, and best after three days.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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A Few Notes
Trim the blossom end. It is the single most common reason home pickles go soft.
Small, firm cucumbers only. A large salad cucumber has too much water and too few walls.
These are refrigerator pickles and are not shelf-stable. They live in the fridge.
Ingredient Swaps
- An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.
Leftovers
Refrigerated for 6 weeks, staying crisp for about three of them. Do not store at room temperature.
Questions and Answers
How long does Quick Refrigerator Pickles take to make?
15 minutes of preparation and 5 minutes of cooking, plus 4 hours 45 minutes of brining, so allow 5 hours 5 minutes from start to finish. The recipe serves 8.
Nutrition per Serving
Per serving, calculated from the ingredient list with USDA FoodData Central figures (SR Legacy). A calculation, not a laboratory analysis: brands, cuts and how you measure change the real numbers. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
Cooked this? Keep a note for next time
Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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