Your Refrigerator Pickles Come Out Crisp Every Time With These

Salad cucumbers are bred watery and thin-skinned, and they pickle into sad rubber. True pickling varieties - Boston, National - are dense, small-seeded and thick-fleshed for exactly this job, and a couple of vines out-supplies a family's pickle ambitions all summer.

Pick at three to four inches daily - a hidden overgrown cuke shuts the vine down.

Grandma's grape leaves and alum worked unreliably; a quarter teaspoon of calcium chloride per jar firms cell walls chemically and reliably - it is the difference you can hear. For refrigerator dills and canned bread-and-butters both, it is the cheapest insurance in the pantry.

Also cut the blossom end off every cuke - its enzymes are the mush factory.

The pickle-shop flavour is a dozen whole spices - mustard seed, coriander, allspice, bay, pepper flake - and buying them separately costs forty dollars of jars you'll use twice. A pound of blended pickling spice covers the whole season of dills, beets and bread-and-butters at a tablespoon a jar.

Whole spices in the jar, never ground - ground goes murky and bitter.

The wavy chip shape is not nostalgia - ridges double the surface drinking brine, so crinkle-cut chips flavour in two days instead of five and grip the burger instead of sliding out. Four dollars of steel, and the pickle jar suddenly looks professionally staffed. Children also inexplicably eat crinkled vegetables.

It does the carrots and beets for the pickle assortment too.

Spears in wide-mouth pints float sideways; in quarts they drown in brine you over-made. The tall 24-ounce pint-and-a-half is the jar actually designed for spears standing upright shoulder-to-shoulder - the pickle-packing jar, and the best-looking jar in the fridge door.

Pack spears TIGHT - loose spears float, and floaters soften first.