So onto canning recipe number two and the spicy pickled beans. My original thinking about making the spicy pickled beans, was as a garnish for my occasional bloody mary’s. Plus this is another way for me to clear out all the bean plants, so that I can get the plot ready for a second planting of beans in a few weeks.

So here is the recipe that I ending up coming up with, with the big change being the brine amount, more on that below:

• 1.5 lbs fresh green and wax beans

Brine:

• 3 cups white vinegar
• 3 cups water
• 1/4 cup plus 2 TB of canning salt

Per pint jar:

• 1 whole clove of garlic
• A small pinch of red pepper flakes

Yield: 4 pints

Probably the biggest difference between this recipe and the pickled carrot recipe, was that I didn’t par-cook the beans before canning them. And also that the brine doesn’t have any white sugar. But other then that, everything else was what you would normally see in a canning recipe (brine making, canning, cooling, etc.) Processing time is 5 mins in a boiling water canner.

As with the carrot recipe, I’m going to give these beans a couple of weeks in the jar before I try them, just to give the vinegar some time to mellow out. And as always, when I finally try them, I’ll let you know how they taste.

Side Notes:
1) For some reason I can’t remember where I got the original recipe. But the original recipe called for 2 cups vinegar, 2 cups water and 1/4 cup of canning salt for the brine. This ended up being only enough liquid for 3 pint jars. So I bumped it up to 2 3/4 cups Vinegar & 2 3/4 cups water and that still wasn’t enough for 4 pint jars, so that was how I ended up at 3 + 3.
2) Here was the recipe that I used for the cooking times, and general recipe guidance.
3) I originally picked about 1.75 lbs of beans. But after cutting the ended and tossing out any damaged beans, it ended up coming in at ~1.5 lbs of finished/cleaned beans.
4) From all the recipes that I’ve seen, the key ratio for the brine seems to be 1 TB of canning salt per 1 cup of liquid. So from there you can pretty much scale the recipe up or down using that ratio.
5) Once again I excluded the crazy dill, since most recipes I saw were for “dilly beans” instead of spicy beans. And since I was making these beans for bloody mary’s. I made the necessary changes to make these “spicy bean”.

Update 08/07/2010: I final cracked open a jar of the wax beans, and they taste pretty good. They are not as spicy as I thought that they would be. And they were very crunchy, when I was expecting them to be a little bit more on the soft side. So as a condiment for a bloody mary, it’s just about right. But if you are looking for soft instead of crunchy, I would say to process the pints for 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes, to give the beans some extra cooking time (since they aren’t par-cooked before processing.)