Bread and Butter Pickles Canning Recipe

Bread and butter pickles turn oversized garden cucumbers into sweet, tangy slices spiced with mustard seed, celery seed, and turmeric. The cucumbers and onions soak in salted water first, which firms them up and pulls the bitterness out of the big ones before anything hits the brine.

The name goes back to the 1920s, and honestly I think the story behind it is half the reason I enjoy making these. A pair of Illinois cucumber farmers were struggling through some lean years, so they started trading jars of sweet pickles to the local grocer for the staples they couldn’t otherwise afford. Since those pickles were literally buying the family’s bread and butter, that’s what everybody started calling them.

What makes the story useful, though, is knowing what those farmers had to work with. Their field had gotten well ahead of them, and what was left out on the vines were gigantic cucumbers, way too big and too far gone to make anything resembling a decent sweet gherkin. So what do you do with a pile of cucumbers that nobody wants?

Every part of this recipe is answering that question. The salt soak firms up the slices and leaches out the bitterness that comes with size, and the spoonful of turmeric puts the gold back into cucumbers that have gone pale and washed out.

This is the traditional version straight out of my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, and it comes out tasting exactly the way a bread and butter pickle is supposed to taste, except that you put it up yourself. It’s a tested canning recipe, which means the vinegar, the proportion of vegetables to brine, and the processing time have all been verified safe for water bath canning.

It’s also the recipe I reach for when the vines have gotten away from me, which around here is most of August. Small cucumbers make a crisper pickle, and that’s true no matter what you do with them, but the salt soak means the giants I find hiding under the leaves don’t have to go out to the compost pile. I slice them evenly, add a little Pickle Crisp, and they hold up just fine.

The brine is really what sets these apart from a dill pickle. Most pickle brines run somewhere around half vinegar and half water, but this one is all vinegar with no water in it at all, and rather than watering that sharpness down, the recipe balances it back out with sugar.

Even so, they don’t come across as candy sweet. The vinegar keeps the sugar honest, and whatever bite the cucumbers hang onto after their soak cuts through the rest of it. The spicing stays simple, and the turmeric is doing considerably more for the color than it is for the flavor.

Ingredients for Bread and Butter Pickles

The pickled vegetables are the classic mix of cucumbers and onions, preserved in a vinegar-heavy brine. Don’t reduce the proportion of vinegar in this recipe, as that’s what keeps everything preserved.

• Pickling cucumbers (any size): Pickling varieties have thinner skin, bumpy or spiny surfaces, and a shorter, fatter shape than slicing cucumbers. This is the rare pickle recipe where the oversized ones are welcome, since the salt soak handles the bitterness that comes with age. Cut everything into quarter-inch rounds and keep the thickness even across the batch, because pieces of wildly different thickness don’t all heat through the same in the canner. Trim the ends and don’t bother peeling.
• Onions (any variety): Plain white or yellow onions are what I use, though sweet onions work too. Slice them thin so they match the cucumber rounds. They soften into the brine and end up almost as good as the cucumbers.
• White vinegar (5% acidity): The acidity is what makes these safe to water bath can, and 5% is not negotiable. Distilled white vinegar keeps the color clean and the flavor sharp, but apple cider vinegar has a more mellow flavor that I like (and it’s still safe for canning at 5% acidity). Never use homemade or unlabeled vinegar for canning, since you can’t know its strength.
• Canning and pickling salt: Pickling salt is pure sodium chloride with no iodine and no anti-caking agents, which is why it won’t cloud your brine or darken the pickles. Every bit of it goes into the soak and gets rinsed away, so it’s working on texture and bitterness rather than preservation.
• Granulated sugar: Sugar balances the all-vinegar brine, and it isn’t the preservative here either. That means you can move it up or down to taste without affecting shelf stability.
• Mustard seed, celery seed, and turmeric: Whole mustard and celery seed give little pops of flavor and keep the brine clearer than ground spices do. The turmeric is mostly there for color, so cut it back if the yellow is stronger than you like.
• Pickle Crisp (optional): Ball Pickle Crisp is calcium chloride, and it’s written right into this recipe as an optional addition. An eighth teaspoon goes into each pint jar at packing time. It firms up the texture without touching the acidity.

If your cucumbers are small and firm and you’d rather have a snappy pickle than a sweet one, they’re better spent on lacto-fermented pickles or a batch of dills. And if the harvest has truly gotten out of hand, my roundup of ways to preserve cucumbers covers everything else you can do with them.

How to Make Bread and Butter Pickles

The process runs in three parts: soak the vegetables in salted water, boil up the brine, then pack and process. Plan on about three hours start to finish, though most of that is the cucumbers sitting in the bowl while you do something else.

Soaking the Cucumbers and Onions

Wash the cucumbers, trim the ends, and slice them into rounds a quarter inch thick. Slice the onions thin so everything in the jar is a similar size. Uniformity matters more than you’d think here, and not only for looks. Thin slices go limp while thick ones stay firm, and pieces that vary too much don’t all heat through the same in the canner.

Combine the cucumbers, onions, and pickling salt in a glass or stainless steel bowl and mix well. Skip aluminum and other reactive metals, which pick up an off-flavor from the salt and acid.

Cover everything with cold water and let it stand at room temperature for two hours while the salt draws out the bitter compounds and firms the slices up.

When the time’s up, tip everything into a colander in the sink and rinse under cool running water. Rinse more thoroughly than feels necessary. Salty pickles are the most common complaint I hear on this recipe, and a quick rinse is almost always the reason. Drain thoroughly so you’re not carrying extra water into the brine.

Making the Pickling Brine

While the vegetables are soaking, get your water bath canner heating and your jars, lids, and rings ready. The jars need to be hot when you pack them, so leave them in the simmering water until you’re ready to fill.

Combine the vinegar, sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, and turmeric in a large stainless steel saucepan and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. You’ll notice there’s no salt going in. All of it went into the soak, and there’s no need for more.

The one thing that doesn’t move is the vinegar. An all-vinegar brine at 5% acidity is what makes these safe for a water bath canner, and cutting it with water or swapping in something milder would change that. The sugar and spices are yours to play with.

Packing the Jars

Stir the drained cucumbers and onions into the boiling brine and bring the whole pot back up to a boil. This is a hot pack, which means the vegetables go into the jars already heated through. It drives air out of the cucumber tissue, keeps the slices from floating, and gives you a better looking jar six months down the road.

Work quickly once it’s boiling. Pack the vegetables into hot jars to within a generous half inch of the top, then ladle hot brine over them to cover, leaving a half inch of headspace. If you’re using Pickle Crisp, add an eighth teaspoon to each pint jar now.

Run a bubble tool around the inside of each jar, top up with more brine if the level dropped, and wipe the rims clean. Center the lids and screw the bands down until you feel resistance, then go just past that to fingertip tight.

Canning Bread and Butter Pickles

You don’t have to can these. Packed into jars and cooled, they’ll keep in the refrigerator for a couple of months and taste every bit as good. Canning is what makes them shelf-stable, and if this is your first batch, my beginner’s guide to water bath canning walks through the whole setup.

Lower the filled jars into the canner, making sure the water covers them completely. Bring it to a boil and process for 10 minutes, counting only once the water has come back to a full rolling boil. Pints and quarts take the same time here, so a bigger jar doesn’t mean a longer boil. If the water stops boiling partway through, bring it back up and start the timer over.

When the time’s up, turn off the heat, take the canner lid off, and leave the jars sitting in the water another five minutes. That pause lets everything cool gradually, which helps the seals set, cuts down on jars cracking from thermal shock, and keeps brine from siphoning out. Then lift the jars onto a towel and leave them alone to cool.

Check the seals once the jars are fully cool, and move any that didn’t take into the refrigerator. Sealed jars hold their quality for a year to 18 months in a dark cupboard. Give them at least two weeks before you open one, and they’re better after a month. The flavors need that time to settle into each other, and a jar opened the next day tastes like sharp vinegar and not much else.

One more thing worth knowing before you go shopping: cucumbers pack much tighter once they’ve been through the soak, so ten cups of slices makes fewer jars than you’d guess looking at the bowl.

Storage Options

However you finish them, keep the jars somewhere dark. Light fades the color and dulls the flavor faster than anything else.

• Refrigerator, uncanned or open jar: 2 to 3 months
• Canned, in the pantry: 12 to 18 months for best quality, refrigerate after opening

Bread and Butter Pickle Variations

Before the fun part, the boundary. The vinegar, the ratio of vegetables to brine, and the processing time all stay exactly as written, because those three things are what make the jars safe on the shelf. Everything else is fair game. The sugar and salt aren’t preserving anything here, so adjust them freely, and the spices are entirely a matter of taste.

The Ball book publishes three named versions alongside the traditional one. For British bread and butter pickles, swap cider vinegar for the white and packed brown sugar for the granulated, then add a teaspoon of ground ginger along with the turmeric. It makes a darker, rounder pickle with more caramel to it.

Zesty bread and butter pickles trade the celery seed for prepared horseradish and the turmeric for grated fresh gingerroot, two tablespoons of each. Losing the turmeric means losing the golden color, so don’t be surprised when they come out pale. They cut hard against the sweetness, which is the point.

Garlic bread and butter pickles are the third, and they’re my pick of the three. Slice the cloves thin and add them to the jars before you fill them, three cloves per pint or six per quart. Slicing matters more than it sounds, since whole cloves sit as dense lumps that heat differently from everything around them. That goes for the single clove in the traditional version too.

Readers have sent in good ones too. Sliced jalapeños give you a couple of rings per jar and a real kick, and sliced bell peppers work the same way for color and sweetness. Red pepper flakes or cracked black pepper are the simplest route to sweet and spicy if you’d rather not slice anything.

If you’re adding peppers, slice them rather than dropping them in whole, and make up a little extra brine so everything in the jar stays fully covered. Keep it all vinegar with no water added, and the acidity has plenty of room to spare for a handful of peppers.

You can also swap summer squash in for the cucumbers, pound for pound. That isn’t me improvising, it’s standing guidance from the National Center for Home Food Preservation that summer squash substitutes for cucumbers in any tested pickle recipe. Slender zucchini and yellow squash both work, sliced the same quarter-inch, which is a useful thing to file away come August.

Zucchini bread and butter pickles are darn good too. And if the squash pile is the real problem, my zucchini canning recipes have more ideas.

Bread and Butter Pickle FAQs

If the cucumber vines are still producing faster than you can keep up, here are a few more ways to get them into jars.

Ways to Preserve Cucumbers

Dill Pickle Recipe for Canning

Sweet Dill Pickle Relish for Canning

15+ Ways to Preserve Cucumbers

Once the pickle jars start lining up on the shelf, it’s hard to stop. Here’s what else is going into the canner this season.

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