Pickled cucumber salad

Ingredients

• Clean (sterile) preserving jars (boiled with hot water)
• 1 kg/2.2 pd. sliced cucumbers
• 1500 ml/52 fl. oz. liquid made from vinegar and water (2 parts water, 1 part vinegar)
• 50 g/1.7 fl. oz. sugar
• 2 tbsp salt
• 2 tbsp mustard seeds
• 2 tbsp dill
• 2 tbsp whole caraway seeds

Instructions

First place the cucumbers in a large bowl with a little salt. Mix in the bowl and leave to stand for about half an hour. Tilt away the water that forms and squeeze out the slices (so that the remaining water comes out and doesn't drip too much). Then layer in the boiled jars (leaving space at the top). Bring the vinegar and water to the boil with the sugar in a pan. Fill the jars with the boiled vinegar water and add the spices (leave 2 - 3 cm/0.8 - 1.2 in of space to the lid). Pour in enough to cover everything. Then close the jars with lids and boil for 30 minutes at 90 ° C/194 ° F in an automatic canner.

Don't have an automatic canner to hand? No problem!

If you don't have an automatic preserving machine, you can also preserve the jars in another way - in a saucepan or in the oven (although the oven is not as safe as the saucepan, as air does not conduct heat as well as water). I would therefore recommend the saucepan).
Preserving in the saucepan:

• Place the jars in a saucepan that is large enough to fit them well. You can also stack the jars
• as long as the pot is high enough so that the topmost jars are two-thirds covered with water, this is no problem at all. Make sure that the jars are positioned so that they cannot fall over during cooking
• Pour enough water into the pot until it has reached at least 2/3 of the height of the cucumber salad in the jar
• Then cook the cucumber salad for 30 minutes. The boiling time starts as soon as the water boils. After boiling, leave the jars in the pan for another 10 minutes, then remove and leave to cool under a cloth. If you don't have a jar lifter (be careful: jars are hot), you can also leave them to cool in the saucepan first (but remove the saucepan from the hot plate).
  Boil in the oven:
• Fill a deep baking tray or ovenproof dish about two to three centimetres full with water and place on the bottom shelf of the oven
• Place the filled jars on the baking tray
• Set the oven to about 175 ° C/347 ° F top/bottom heat
• Set the temperature to zero as soon as the water boils and leave the jars in the water bath for at least 30 more minutes