We are a pickle-loving household, and usually have a few jars in the fridge and a couple back-ups in the pantry. This sounds excessive, but how else do you have spears, stackers, chips, and cornichons, and guarantee you won't have to fight over the last stacker on burger night?
So inevitably, we go through several jars a year, each over half-full of that delicious, dilly, garlicky brine.
You can use up that brine in anything that requires an acidic component, like marinades.
But why not reuse it for its original purpose? Simply chop up a cucumber into your preferred shape, put it in the jar, and in a few days, you have round 2 of pickles. (I used 1 medium pickle to fill a 24 oz jar.) Make sure your cucumber is submerged and don't forget if you put chips in a jar labelled stackers. :)
The original recommendation I saw for this stated it would take about 2 days to make these "fridge pickles" (good term to Google for other pickle reciples that don't require the canning method), but we found that at 2 days they were still crunchy and cucumber-y. They were perfect for us at about 1 week.
Not only did we get a second use of the jar and brine, but I didn't need to experiment with getting the right spice combination to make homemade brine from scratch, when we love that classic Vlasic flavor.
Average cost of a cucumber? $0.79
Cost of a 24 oz jar of pickles? $2.49
You've saved $1.70 (68%), and reduced your glass and food waste!
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