4

I’ve been making sweet pickles for about 40 years now. They have won best of show at the county fair and lots of blue ribbons in the past. My issue is this year. They are just not sweet enough. Can I empty these jars? Separate the pickles from the syrup, add more sugar to the syrup, and process these pickles again?

Xander Henderson
  • 2,562
  • 9
  • 27
Sandy Schell
  • 41
  • 1

1 Answers1

2

I have absolutely no canning experience, but based on what I know from cooking and safe food handling in general:

If a food has already absorbed one flavor, it can sometimes be difficult to get it to absorb a new one. In your specific case, Chef Saito in an episodes of NHK's Dining With The Chef mentioned in a recipe that they added the sugar before the salt when simmering, because the salt was smaller and easier to absorb but would then block the sugar from absorbing. (I have no idea if this is anecdotal or scientifically proven).

As such, I suspect that you may need to use a higher concentration of sugar than you would have used originally to get the same flavor (if you were trying to deal with a case of forgetting the sugar or the wrong amount)... but it's possibly affected by time as well, so there might be some storage time when this wouldn't be necessary.

For food safety, you're going to need to repeat the canning process... boiling liquid into sterilized jars. If you skip this, the pickles are at risk of fermenting in the jars, especially with the extra sugar (and reduced salt, which has been absorbed by the pickels)

But because you're cooking the pickles a a second time (in the hot brine and canning bath), this may affect the texture. I have no idea how pickle crisp or similar might work if used the second time if it wasn't added the first time around.

Joe
  • 82,913
  • 19
  • 164
  • 476