Pickled Asparagus

Our oldest dd picked for Sutcliffe Farms this year. She was able to bring home some yummy asparagus!!! The favourite way of preparing them here is by stir-frying them in butter with plenty of minced fresh garlic. Double yum.

On the last day of picking she brought home about 30 lbs of asparagus. Time to do something more with them, even our horde of veggie lovers couldn't eat through that much before it went off.


We use our regular dill pickle recipe for this, the same one we also use to pickle beans.

Step one is washing your jars, preparing the brine, getting the canner started, and preparing your lids, garlic and dill. The link to the dill pickle recipe provides fairly good details for this.

Step two is washing the asparagus and trimming it to fit into the jars. Snap off the woody bits on the butt ends. Asparagus that was picked properly won't have any white or purply bits, those bits are just compost. The asparagus from Sutcliffe's is picked by snapping off cleanly and has no composty bits. The ends that I did snap off I set aside to blanche and freeze for soups. They are just fine for soup!

We did full length for the pints and sliced for the quarts. If you are canning for the Fall Fair competition use full length and really pay attention to the uniformity of the thickness of the spears. When you are canning for home use... just whack them up and pack them in :o)

I put one garlic clove for a pint and two for a quart. Our dill out in the garden doesn't have heads yet so I substituted dill seed from the bulk spice aisle at the store, 1 tsp. per jar. (Yes, yes, I know, I will save dill seed for next year. What WAS I thinking!)



Step three is adding the brine, lids and then processing. I put the jars into the boiling canner, put the lid on, and set the timer for 10 minutes.

The final product: