Forget Store-Bought Pickles, You Can Make Homemade Ones With 3 Ingredients

Whether you have an abundance of cucumbers from your garden (or someone off-loaded a bunch onto you from their garden) or your Instacart shopper accidentally got you 10 instead of one, there has never been a better time to learn to make your own pickles. It's one of the five tips you need to become a culinary craftsman — and you literally need just three simple ingredients that you likely already have in your kitchen and pantry: Water, sugar (or salt — take your pick), and distilled white vinegar. Yup, that's it.

Before you start, though, you'll want to slice your cucumbers to help them pickle faster. You get to decide how thick you want them, and if you're worried about not cutting them to a uniform thickness, you can use a mandoline, like this model from OXO. Then, put them in glass jars and set them aside while you prep the pickling liquid.

A good rule of thumb for pickling liquid is a 1:2:3 ratio: For every one tablespoon of sugar or salt, you'll need twice as much vinegar, and three times as much water. Combine your brine in a sauce pot and let it come to just a boil; the sugar or salt should be completely dissolved. Then, pour it over your cucumber slices, and let it come to room temperature before screwing the lid on and placing it in the fridge for at least a few hours. Could it be any easier?

Once you have that basic recipe down, then you can start to really have fun with your pickles, playing around with ingredients and flavors. For example, try adding different herbs and spices into the mix — kosher salt would be a great addition to up the savory factor, as well as red pepper flakes (for some spice), whole black peppercorns, mustard seeds, or fresh dill or cilantro. You could also include whole cloves of garlic, chopped jalapeño, or sliced onion (or cute pearl onions for bonus pickles). Start with one extra ingredient, and then build out from there — you don't have to add a lot of extra if the ingredients are fresh and flavorful.

Increase the sugar, and you've got bread and butter pickles. Switch out the distilled white vinegar for apple cider vinegar or even rice vinegar, and you've still got that sour pucker, but with a slightly different flavor profile (both apple cider vinegar and rice vinegar are sweeter than white). Also, you don't have to pickle just cucumbers — you give pretty much any crunchy vegetable (green beans, carrots, red onions, radishes) a dunk in your three-ingredient brine, and you can pickle fruits easily, too.