Easy Recipe Half-Sour Pickles Russian Style. How to make Half Sour Pickles

Half Sour Pickles ( we also call them Malosol’nie Ogurci or Half salted pickles ) was a very popular food as I was growing up. You can eat them as a light snack, you can eat them with potatoes, you can have them as an appetizer and of course it goes great with vodka at every party!

Main difference between half sour and full sour pickles is that you use half amount of salt in the brine, they are less fermented and will stay half pickled in the fridge for about 2 week. Preparation process for half sour pickles is much faster. These cukes also keep a lot brighter green color in the process.


I personally have experimented with a lot of different recipes and arrived at this recipe which produces the best crunchiness and best flavor to my taste. So here it is.

First you need to pick proper cucumbers: you should go for organic Kirby cucumbers, in some markets they also could be called pickled cucumbers. Normally you can find them in the local farmers market.

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We are going to need a following ingredients for preparation:

Fresh organic kirby cucumbers
Garlic - about 5 cloves
Dill - 1 bunch
Black peppercorns - 1 tbsp
Coriander - 1 tbsp
Dry Bay leaf - about 5-7 leaves
And finally Kosher salt - 2 tbsp for 4 cups of water.

If you want to get more creative and experiment with the flavors, you can add other ingredients such as:

Apple - you can put 5-6 slides
You can add some leaves of Horseradish ( you can also add chopped horseradish root as well ), you can also add grape leaves, sour cherry leaves or red currant leaves.
If you like spicy flavor, you can add a few chili peppers or some other spicy peppers as you wish.


Alright, preparation steps:

Step#1: Wash cucumbers well and put them in cold water for about 2 hours ( I added some ice to make the water even colder ). It helps to increase the crunchiness of the cukes. Then cut out both sides of the cucumber ( it helps to make sure that brine will get inside the vegetable during fermentation process )

Step#2: Take a medium size jar ( doesn't need to be sterilized ). Add half of the chopped dill, some bay leaves, half of sliced garlic, half of the coriander and pepper corns, and some apple slices to the bottom of the jar. Then fill up the jar with cucumbers to the top, put cucumbers as tight as possible.
Then put remaining ingredients on top of the jar.

Step#3: Alright, next you need to create brine using 2 tablespoons of kosher salt for 4 cups of cold water. For my jar I used 6 cups of water and 3 tablespoons of salt. Then dissolve the salt in the brine. Use filtered water to avoid any chlorine getting into the brine. Fill in the jar with the brine to the very top to cover all the cucumbers. And finally, close the jar and put it in the fridge for 3 days.

If you have any pickles left, keep the remaining pickles in the fridge. Half sour pickles will retain this half sour taste for another few weeks and then after they will start turning into more of a full sour pickles.

And If you have tried experimenting with different flavors...different leaves or added some extra spice, add some comments down below to tell me more about your results.

I truly hope you enjoyed this video, remember to subscribe to my channel, I have more interesting and unique recipes coming very soon.

Thanks for watching and have a great pickling season.