What To Do With Large Cucumbers (Recipes) - Fillmore Container (2024)
(Updated – July 27, 2020)
If you’re looking for things to do with cucumbers, we have the answer! Large cucumbers are often hard to transform into crispy pickle spears and are often quite seedy, but still have much potential! I recently had some very large cucumbers. My initial plan was to pickle them, but their seedy nature was making that difficult. So, we changed things up a little. After I washed and trimmed them, I used my mandolin to slice as much of each cucumber as I could until the seeds began to interfere with the crispness of the slice. All of these nice slices were transformed into Maw Maw’s Cucumber Salad, which we’d shared earlier. Yum!
Let’s Make Cucumber Relish – It’s Easy!
The full recipe for our cucumber relish is at the bottom!
Even though we used crispy slices to make a cucumber salad, we can turn the rest of a cucumber, even if it’s old cucumbers, into a delicious cucumber relish! I took the remaining cucumber parts, sliced them lengthwise, and scooped out the seeds. These were then cubed for relish! I like a relish in which all of the players can be identified, so removing the seedy, watery parts helps to maintain more texture.
As it turns out, I knew that I’d be short on peppers for this recipe, so I washed and cubed all of my peppers first to see what ratio of the original recipe I could make. I ended up with only half of what the recipe called for.
Clean, seed (as appropriate) and finely chop the cucumbers, green and yellow bell peppers, and onion. Then in a non-reactive bowl, combine the cucumbers, peppers, onions, and pickling salt and cover it. Let it set in a cool place for about 4 hours.
Transfer into a colander in the sink and rinse thoroughly with cold water for 4 minutes. Drain well, gently press more of the excess water out with your hands, set aside to drain further. Prepare water bath canner, jars & lids.
In a large non-reactive saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds & celery seeds. On medium heat, and while stirring, bring to a boil. Add cucumber, pepper & onion mixture and while stirring, return to a boil. Reduce heat, but maintain a gentle boil for about 10 minutes.
Scoop the relish into warmed canning jars, allowing ½ inch of headspace. Remove any air bubbles, wipe rims clean, lid the jars and apply rings only to finger-tip tightness.
Place jars into the prepared water bath canner. Adjust water level if needed (you should have at least an inch above the jars) so that the jars are completely covered throughout the process. Bring to a boil and process jars (8oz and 16oz) for 10 minutes. When the time is up, remove from heat and allow to cool for 5 minutes before carefully removing them from the canner.
Place hot filled jars on a towel-lined counter to cool untouched for 12 hours. When jars have completely cooled, remove rings, test the seal and store in a cool dark place. If any of your lids have not sealed, refrigerate it and enjoy right away!
Based on the recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. Yield: 4 Pints.
Ingredients
5cupscucumbers
2cupsgreen bell peppers
2cupsred /yellow bell peppers
½cuponion
¼ to ½cuppickling salt
1 ½cupwhite vinegar
1 ¼cupsugar
1 ½tbsp.celery seeds
1 ½tbsp.mustard seeds
Instructions
Clean, seed (as appropriate) and finely chop the cucumbers, green & yellow bell peppers and onion.
In a non-reactive bowl, combine the cucumbers, peppers, onions, and the pickling salt and cover it. Let it set in a cool place for about 4 hours.
Prepare .
Transfer cucumber mix into a colander in the sink and rinse thoroughly with cold water for 4 minutes. Drain well, gently press more of the excess water out with your hands, set aside to drain further.
In a large non-reactive saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds & celery seeds. On medium heat, and while stirring, bring to a boil.
Add cucumber, pepper & onion mixture and while stirring, return to a boil. Reduce heat, but maintain a gentle boil for about 10 minutes.
Scoop the relish into warmed canning jars, allowing ½ inch of headspace.
Remove any air bubbles, wipe rims clean, lid the jars and apply rings only to finger-tip tightness.
Place jars into the prepared water bath canner. Bring to a boil and process jars (8oz and 16oz) for 10 minutes.
Place cucumbers in large kettle; add 1 cup vinegar, food coloring, alum, and enough water to cover. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 2 hours and drain. Combine remaining 2 cups vinegar, 2 cups water, sugar, cinnamon and candy in large saucepan; bring to a boil, stirring until sugar in dissolved.
Unless otherwise specified, cucumbers of this grade shall not exceed 5-1/2 inches in length or 1-7/8 inches in diameter, but the length shall be not less than 2-1/2 times the diameter.)
The overgrown cucumbers have a nice thick boarder of flesh. A regular sized cucumber has a thinner boarder & is much smaller in size. It's important to have those thick large slices so they don't break apart easily during the process & so they are a good finger food size for eating later. The bigger the better!
First, wash the cucumbers, dry them thoroughly, and peel them (you don't want to freeze the skins). Then flash freeze them for a few hours on a lined baking tray before packing them up in freezer bags and returning them to the freezer.
Flesh – The flesh can get softer and a little drier as a cucumber gets larger; although, this is not usually as big of an issue as some other cucurbits such as squash, for example, can become rather "grainy" as they go oversize.
Cucumbers are about 95% water, so freezing and thawing will affect their cell structure, resulting in a mushy texture. But there are many recipes where that texture will work to your advantage. Frozen cucumbers can be made into soups, dips, or smoothies, since a mushy texture won't make or break these dishes.
Any yellow cucumber varieties listed above are specifically meant to be eaten when yellow and are perfectly edible. However, pickling or slicing cucumbers that are meant to be green are unpalatable if they've turned yellow. They tend to be pithy with large seeds and quite bitter.
Ideal pots are a foot or more in depth, and that size will increase your harvest. A pot that's 20 inches wide can accommodate four to six plants. Two or three plants will fit in a five-gallon bucket or grow one cucumber in a 10-inch-wide container.
One of the most common types of Cucumbers is the Long English. Like the name says, these Cucumbers are the longest type of Cucumber, usually around fourteen inches. Long English Cucumbers have a good crunch with thin, delicate skin that's easy to digest.
Kirby (or Pickling) Cucumbers: Short, oftentimes bumpy, these vary in color from yellow to dark green. They are good to eat raw, but they're especially ideal for pickling. Persian Cucumbers: Similar to English Cucumbers, these are mild in taste. Sometimes bumpy, and with thin skins, they are ideal for eating raw.
Although they tend to have larger, more plentiful seeds, softball-sized pickling cukes make great sandwich slicers. I mean, who doesn't want a crunchy pickle that covers the whole burger patty? No one, that's who.
For salty pickled cucumbers, like kosher pickles, slice the raw cucumbers and layer them in jars with mustard seeds.Then cover them with a boiling salt brine of 100 g salt per litre of water and a splash of vinegar essence, and seal the jar. This pickling process is entirely sugar-free.
Step 1: Slice the cucumber in half lengthwise. Step 2 (optional): Use the tip of a spoon to scrape out the seeds. Step 3: Cut the halves in half lengthwise, so you have four total spears. You can cut the spears widthwise, depending on the desired length, to make smaller spears.
Sometimes too much fertilizer can cause deformed cucumbers. As they mature, cucumbers require less feeding. On the other hand, deformities in cucumbers could mean there were insufficient nutrients in the soil right from the get-go. In this case, a side-dressing of fertilizer or compost will help.
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