Beginners Guide to Pickling – How to Pickle Almost Anything. Best pickles recipes. Copyright © 2022 Terence Carter / Grantourismo. All Rights Reserved.

Our Best Pickles Recipes for Easy Delicious Refrigerator Pickles and Quick Pickles

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Our best pickles recipes cover a range of recipes for homemade pickles – everything from our Mexican pickled jalapenos recipe to an Eastern Europe style dill pickles recipe based on my baboushka’s gherkins or pickled cucumbers. They’re refrigerator pickles or quick pickles, which are faster to prepare, must be kept in the fridge, yet are still incredibly delicious.

Our best quick pickle recipes include a combination of family recipes – the pickles that my Russian grandparents used to make at home with the harvest from their own vegetable garden – and recipes for pickles that we have long made from our favourite cuisines, from Mexico to the Middle East.

Before I tell you about our best refrigerator pickle recipes, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve cooked our recipes and enjoyed them, please consider supporting Grantourismo by using our links to buy travel insurance, rent a car or book accommodation, or book a tour on Get Your Guide. You could also browse our Grantourismo store for gifts for food lovers designed with Terence’s images.

Another option is to support our epic Cambodian cuisine history and cookbook on Patreon; buy us a coffee, although we’ll use our coffee money to buy cooking ingredients for recipe testing; or buy something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers, James Beard award-winning cookbooks, and classic cookbooks for serious cooks. Now let me tell you all about our best pickles recipes.

Best Pickles Recipes for Quick and Easy Yet Delicious Refrigerator Pickles or Quick Pickles

Just a few quick tips to making these pickles recipes. When I was a child, my Russian-Ukrainian grandparents used to stuff their cucumbers into enormous pickling jars that I swear were bigger than me. They were feeding a family, but there’s only two of us, so we opt for small pickling jars, filling them with no more than we’d eat or snack on over a month.

We mostly use these vintage mason jars and clip-top Kilner jars for refrigerator pickles, but we also recycle jars for pickling, thoroughly sterilising them first. I also love to make a mix of pickles in different sized jars, so we can gift some jars and keep others for our own use.

When it comes to vinegar, I like to use a distilled white vinegar for refrigerator pickles, as it lends a purity to the flavour, so that you can use your pickles with anything from Mexican food to Moroccan food. Some picklers prefer to use cider vinegar which I do use for Mexican pickles and European pickles. You can also experiment with a combination of the two.

We recommend using the coarsely granulated sea salt but you can also use Kosher salt. Don’t use fine grained table salt or iodised salt as this usually contains potassium iodide, dextrose and chemicals, such as calcium silicate and sodium silicoaluminate. These will give you a cloudy brine and muddy look, while potassium iodide can also cause your pickles to darken.

Best Pickles Recipes for Quick and Easy Yet Delicious Refrigerator Pickles or Quick Pickles

If you enjoy these recipes for quick pickles or refrigerator pickles, do bookmark this page as we’ll be adding more recipes for homemade pickles from time to time.

Mexican Pickled Jalapeños Recipe

This homemade pickled jalapeños recipe makes one of our best pickle recipes for quick and easy refrigerator pickles that are fantastic served as a side or topped on Mexican dishes such as tacos and tostadas and Tex-Mex favourites such as nachos and burritos.

These jalapeños take ten minutes to make and are far more affordable and more delicious than a jar of store-bought jalapeños. You can use these homemade pickled jalapeños in exactly the same way you would store-bought jalapeños.

You can sprinkle jalapeños on top of any number of Mexican breakfast dishes, on chilaquiles, tacos, tostadas, nachos, and chilli con carne, include them in this Mexican corn salsa, serve them as sides to tortas, or layer them with your fillings for quesadillas or burritos. You can also use them in burgers and sandwiches.

While you should try to make your homemade pickled jalapeños with fresh jalapeño chilli peppers if you can, we can’t get fresh jalapeños here so for now we’re using another local green chilli pepper that looks like an unripe serrano pepper, but after pickling for a week it tastes exactly like pickled jalapeños.

Homemade Mexican Pickled Jalapenos Recipe for Quick and Easy Refrigerator Pickles

Russian Dill Pickles Recipe

My Russian dill pickles recipe is one of our most popular recipes for quick pickles. It makes homemade gherkins or pickled cucumbers just like my Russian grandparents made. My papa and baboushka used the water bath canning method but my recipe is for easy refrigerator pickles but they’re just as delicious.

Baba served dill pickles with every meal, with dishes of gherkins accompanying her crock pots of pelmeni and vareniki; piroshki kept warm under tea-towels; casserole dishes of stuffed cabbage rolls; and plates of juicy Russian kotleti.

Pickles go in my Russian devilled eggs, potato salad (AKA Olivier salad or ensalada Rusa), traditional Russian beef stew, Russian barley and pickle soup/stew, I sprinkle diced pickles on blini with smoked salmon, sour cream and dill and buckwheat kasha and add a layer of pickled cucumbers to my mini mimosa salads.

You can also serve gherkins with beer battered fish and chips, in homemade tartare sauce, on an array of burgers, and as sides to Southern style fried chicken.

Russian Dill Pickles Recipe for Homemade Gherkins Just Like My Russian Grandparents Made

Quick Pickled Vegetables Recipe for Mexican Escabeche

This quick pickled vegetables recipe makes another of our favourite pickle recipes for homemade vegetable pickles or Mexican escabeche. These crunchy pickles are in the style of the tangy Mexican pickles typically served at restaurants and taquerias in Mexico.

They’re not only delicious, they’re versatile, so you can adjust the pickle brine to your taste, softening the tang or giving them more bite. If you’ve spent any time in Mexico, you will definitely remember tangy vegetable pickles.

They’re usually served in a small dish that waiters set down on the table when they leave your menus or take your order. If you’re at a fonda or restaurant, they might come with salsa and tortilla crisps or bread.

At a fancy Mexican restaurant there might be a whole tray of different pickles, salsas and perhaps some guacamole, while at a more simple taqueria, you’ll get a dish of pickles when you order your cervezas.

Quick Pickled Vegetables Recipe for Homemade Mexican Escabeche in the Style of Taqueria Pickles

Pickled Onions Recipe

Our easy Mexican quick pickled onions recipe makes yet another of our best quick pickle recipes for zingy refrigerator pickle in the style of Mexico’s Yucatan pink onion pickles. It’s a perfect condiment, garnish or side for any number of dishes. And not only Mexican dishes although they’re fantastic with Mexican tacos, tostadas, tortas, or chilli con carne.

They’re also very versatile. You can make these quick pickles with red onions or purple shallots and adapt the seasoning to your taste. If you’ve made any of our Mexican breakfast recipes over the years, you would have noticed that we often use pink shallots or red onions, fresh or pickled.

When you see pink pickled shallots in our images, such as this pic for my Eastern European style savoury barley porridge recipe, we’re using this Mexican quick pickled onions recipe. They go with absolutely everything.

Mexican Quick Pickled Onions Recipe for Tangy Pink Onions to Brighten Your Tacos

Pickled Red Cabbage Recipe

Our Mexican quick pickled red cabbage recipe makes col roja en escabeche, col lombarda en escabeche or col morada en escabeche, all of which mean red cabbage or purple cabbage in escabeche.

‘Col’ is cabbage and ‘escabeche’ refers to the process of ‘cooking’ in an acidic marinade of vinegar and water to which salt, pepper, maybe sugar, and perhaps herbs and spices, such as bay leaves and oregano are added.

This easy quick pickled red cabbage recipe makes another of our best pickles recipes for piquant purple pickles to pep up any meal. Try saying that quickly! These delightfully zesty refrigerator pickles are the perfect topping for tacos, a bright filling for burgers or a tangy accompaniment to toasted sandwiches.

Whether you use this red cabbage quick pickle as a side, garnish or condiment, it’s very versatile and you can easily adapt the flavour to your palate or cuisine. I use this pickled cabbage with everything from Mexican dishes to Middle Eastern and Eastern European food.

Quick Pickled Red Cabbage Recipe for Piquant Purple Pickles to Pep Up Any Meal

Please do let us know in the comments below if you make any of our best pickles recipes, as we’d love to know how they turn out for you. We’d also appreciate it if you could take a moment to leave a rating.

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A travel and food writer who has experienced over 70 countries and written for The Guardian, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Feast, Delicious, National Geographic Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, DestinAsian, TIME, CNN, The Independent, The Telegraph, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, AFAR, Wanderlust, International Traveller, Get Lost, Four Seasons Magazine, Fah Thai, Sawasdee, and more, as well as authored more than 40 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, DK, Footprint, Rough Guides, Fodors, Thomas Cook, and AA Guides.

2 thoughts on “Our Best Pickles Recipes for Easy Delicious Refrigerator Pickles and Quick Pickles”

  1. Interesting topic! This summer, our neighbors had an abundance of produce from their gardens and gave us so much we pickled them. Koreans pickle all sort of veggies, which they serve as banchan before the meal. I used famed chef David Chang’s recipes to pickle my banana and jalapeno peppers, cucumbers and okra. They were delicious, and our neighbors love them!

  2. Hi Eileen, lovely to hear from you! We adore banchan!!! (I’m making kimchi tomorrow actually.) We lived in an inner-city Sydney neighbourhood back in the 90s where there were lots of Korean BBQ restaurants, although we had our favourite that we ate at weekly and I think we relished the banchan as much as the BBQ. The more I research pickling, the more I realise how many culinary cultures preserve by pickling – and fermenting, smoking, etc. Southeast Asians have always been shocked when I’ve told them I grew up in a Russian-Australian family where pickling was a regular activity. But likewise Europeans who come here are often surprised to learn Cambodians pickle as they see it as a European thing. I think we really are all more similar than different. Cambodians pickle green bananas, actually, but I’ve only tried them a couple of times and I can’t say I was in love with them. But I adore pickled limes (Thai/Cambodian) and lemons (Moroccan). So good! Thanks for visiting!

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