No backyard barbecue, picnic or celebration is complete without a good pickle relish. Pickles tend to be too long to really sit nicely inside a hot dog or brat bun, but relish fills in all those empty spaces just perfectly- but it’s so hard to find dill pickle relish (good or otherwise).
There aren’t a lot of pickle relish options available on the market- and the ones that are are usually sweet pickle. As an ardent dill pickle lover, I am, perhaps unjustly so, a ferverent sweet pickle hater. That means that I can’t relish at the relish at most backyard grill-outs. My solution? Bring home-made dill pickle relish as a housewarming/party gift to every one I attend! Boom. Problem solved, plus I just brought a present!
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Dill Pickle Relish
Of course that meant I had to make a dill pickle relish I liked… Luckily I have perfected my Dill Pickle recipe over the years, so I figured I could use some tricks from that, as well some I learned from when I pickled pears to come up with a truly satisfying relish.
Recipe for Dill Pickle Relish
Start with several medium size cucumbers (6 or 7). Wash completely and thoroughly, and cut off any bad spots, but leave as much skin as you can- that’s where the green color will come from in your relish.
Shred the cucumber using a grater or a food processor (I use and love my Cuisinart 14-Cup Food Processor)
Mince the jalapeños in a food processor– 3 or 4 jalapeños are easier to break up in this fashion, plus then you don’t have to worry about getting pepper juice on your fingers.
Note: If you want to remove some of the heat, cut open the jalapeños before mincing in the food processor and remove seeds. The spicy heat is in the seeds.
Combine the cucumbers and jalapeños. Then, in a large, non-reactive pot, boil apple cider vinegar, pickling salt, dill seed, mustard seed and celery seed together. Once it has boiled mix everything together to boil for another 10 minutes.
Water Bath Canning:
As you’re cooking the relish liquid, fill a separate water bath pot with water. Put on stove at high heat and cover so that it will be boiling by the time you are ready to use for the Water Bath Canning.
Sanitize and clean pint glass jars with steaming hot water, or by running them through the dishwasher.
Put canning jar lid tops in hot water to soften wax around rims for an easier seal.
Using your clean and sterilized canning jars, pour the mixture into each jar. Wipe rims of filled jars with a clean cloth (this assures that there is nothing on the rims that will keep the softened wax from sealing). Place lids from hot water on jar top, hold securely in place and screw on bands.
Place jars in boiling hot water bath using a jar lifter. Process (by leaving jars fully submerged under water) in water bath for 15 min. Remove and allow to cool and seal for up to 24 hours.
Store the pickle-relish-filled jars in a cool, dark place.
The canned Dill Pickle Relish will last at least a year in a cool, dark place on your shelf, unless you eat it faster.
| Servings |
Pint Jars
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- 7 cups Cucumbers Medium to Large size
- 3 Jalapeños Deseeded for less spice
- 2.75 cups Apple Cider Vinegar
- 6 cloves Garlic Halved
- 2.5 Tbsp. Pickling Salt
- 1.5 tsp. Dill Seed
- 1 tsp. Mustard Seed
- 1 tsp. Celery Seed
Ingredients
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- Shred all of the cucumbers into small pieces by using a cheese grater. Mince the jalapeño peppers.
- In a large stainless steel pot boil vinegar, salt, seeds and halved garlic cloves. Once the liquid mix has come to a boil, add veggies; cucumbers and jalapeños.
- Bring liquid mixture back to a boil. Simmer on medium heat for 10 minutes.
- Pour hot liquid mixture into cleaned and sanitized pint jars.
- Sanitize and clean pint glass jars with steaming hot water, or by running them through the dishwasher.
- As you're cooking the relish liquid, fill a separate water bath pot with water. Put on stove at high heat and cover so that it will be boiling by the time you are ready to use for the Water Bath Canning.
- Put canning jar lid tops in hot water to soften wax around rims for an easier seal.
- Wipe rims of filled jars with a clean cloth. Place lids from hot water on jar top, hold securely in place and screw on bands.
- Place jars in boiling hot water bath using a jar lifter. Process (leaving jars fully submerged under water) in water bath for 15 min. Remove from boiling water and let cool.
Enjoy your homemade dill relish on burgers, brats, hot dogs, in potato salads or anything else which could be accentuated with scrumptious pickle flavoring!
That looks really nummy! I haven’t made a relish before. I want to eat that brat in the photo :-D
Thanks Stephanie! The best part about that brat is that it was a sauerkraut venison brat! Pretty much the best thing ever :c) And the relish rocks too- let me know how you like it.
Hi, I am glad I found this recipe I had searched and searched for a dill relish without sugar. I have my jars in the water bath right now. I measured everything and ended up with 4 pints . It looks and smells yummy, just want to make sure I didn’t do something wrong!!
Thanks again :)
Yay! A dill lover after my own heart :c) I’m sure you didn’t do anything wrong with your recipe. A lot of times the pint qty. can vary based on the size of the cucumbers. The goal is more that you end up with a perfect relish without it being too runny than correct pint size. I will amend my recipe to say cucumbers on the larger size- if you’re using pickle size cukes then it might be little more runny. Hopefully that will help give a little more guidance in the future. :-) Thank you very much for the question!
Looking forward to hearing about it once you get to crack open one of those jars!
Can you leave out the jalapenos completely?
Can you leave out the jalapenos completely? How spicy does it make the pickles?
Love that this is no sugar! Thank you!
Hi Kenna- Yes, you absolutely can leave out the jalapeños- I like for everything to have a little bit of a kick, but it doesn’t make it too spicy. If you aren’t a fan of any kind of spice it’s probably a good a idea to try a batch first without them.
Definitely let me know how they turn out! (And I love no sugar too- thanks so much for your questions!)
I’m not a canner, do you have a sugar free refrigerator dill relish?
Can relish be frozen?
Hi Suz-
You could certainly make this a refrigerator dill relish by taking out the water bath part of the recipe at the very end. Just make sure to keep the relish in the fridge- and note that it’ll last about 3 to 4 weeks max. I’d also split the recipe in half or even a quarter and make it in smaller batches.
That’s a great question about freezing the relish- my guess is that it can’t be frozen because cucumbers are such water-heavy vegetables I think that freezing it would completely ruin the texture when you tried to defrost and use it later. If you try it though I’d love to know the results!
Hope that helps!
Greta
Do you put your spices in cheese cloth? So they can be removed or just let them stay in ?
Great question Bobby-
You could do either, but I love keeping the spices in the mix so I didn’t use a cheesecloth and just let them stay. They will help to accentuate the flavor as the jars sit, but you could certainly remove them too so you don’t have to eat it in your relish later ;-) Let me know what you decide to do and how it turns out!
Thank you!! I thought I would never find a dill rel1ish without sugar.
So glad you liked it Carey! I got so sick of the sweet relishes that I had to make something sugar-less :-)
I am sure someone has asked this already, but I’m too lazy to scroll through the comments – LOL.
About how many cucumbers (say medium sized) to you think it takes to get 7 cups (and I am guessing it is 7 cups AFTER shredding)? I am heading to the farmer’s market after work and want to make sure I pick up enough.
Looking forward to trying this! I love dill pickle relish and haven’t made it in a few years.
Thank you!
Great question Betsy, but such a hard one to answer as the size of cucumbers vary so much. I would say that if you’re using larger cucumbers you would probably want 5-7 cucumbers and double that if you’re using smaller or medium sized pickling cukes. My suggestion would be to buy a few and then shred them and decrease the recipe based off of how many cups with which you end up. I believe the recipe program I use here will actually recalculate based on some of those things for you. Hope that helps- I know it wasn’t a complete answer…! And good luck! I’ll look forward to hearing how they turn out!
I’m using bigger cucumbers, do I want to remove the seeds?
Also, I only have dill, not fill seeds. What would be the substitution amount?
Hi Vicky-
Great question. I used bigger cucumbers as well and didn’t remove the seeds. It turned out fine, but next time I would probably remove the larger seeds from the really big cucumbers- The flavor was fine, but the texture was just a little different. So completely up to you!! Let me know what you decide to do and how it turns out!