The Pickle Authority

Posted by Tom Gaertner on July 28, 2015 – wauwatosanow.com

Anyone visiting the WauwatosaNOW homepage may have taken note that in the lower right hand corner under MOST POPULAR for the last month or so the Gas Pains blog about How to Make Crispy, Crunchy, Sweet Pickles has been in the pole position or close to it.  More popular than the crime report, a new restaurant or business opening or someone running for president.

The dang pickle post is persistently on that popularity list.  Having reappeared about a month ago it’s apparently getting clobbered by page views and has demonstrated staying power.

The first week of September, 2011 I threw together a blog post about How to Make Crispy Crunchy Sweet Pickles.  To be fair the genesis of the recipe came to me via my pal The First Mate’s wife.  I think it may have been her grandmother’s recipe. I’ve been tweaking it ever since and last year perfected the recipe for How to Make Crispy Crunchy Dill Pickles.

Seems ‘how to’ posts are perennial favorites but nothing rises to popularity of pickled cucumbers.  Don’t believe me?  Just type – how to make crispy (or crunchy) sweet pickles in your favorite search engine and see what you get for a result.

At the time I tapped-out that blog post I had no notion of becoming the fountain of all knowledge and inspiration as it pertains to home canning of pickled cukes.  But by fluke of luck and search engine optimization I seem to have become an authority on the subject and this time of year emails materialize from all over the country requesting details, diagnoses of problems and the popularity of the end product.  With every passing year interest in this subject post has grown in popularity.

Anyway, about that MOST POPULAR ranking – as soon as the pickle harvest has run its course and everyone has put-up another year’s supply of crispy crunchy pickles the fervor will diminish, the page views will fade and a quietude will fall upon the blog.  The exception being a blip in the winter from residents of the southern hemisphere.  Go figure.

Then as predictably as the swallows returning to Capistrano the process will begin all over again in May or June of 2016.

I’d like to raise a toast to gardening, growing your own food and preserving the fruits of the harvest be it by canning, freezing or drying.