How to pickle cherry tomatoes for the winter

Cherries are salted in bags, buckets, or tubs. Let's look at a universal recipe for salting cherry tomatoes in jars.

This method is good because it is compact. Cherries can be pickled in liter or half-liter jars and stored all winter without fear that they will turn sour. This method is something between pickling and pickling, but unlike pickling, pickling does not require vinegar and sugar.

To pickle cherry tomatoes, you only need salt and spices. Among the spices, you need to pay attention to horseradish leaves, black currant leaves, basil, bay leaf, and of course, you can’t do without garlic, cloves and peppercorns. Of course, spices are selected individually, according to taste. And you need salt:

• for 1 l. water – 60 gr. salt.

Wash the jars with detergent and rinse them thoroughly. There is no need to sterilize the jars; in this recipe it is absolutely unnecessary.

Wash the tomatoes in cool water and pierce each tomato with a toothpick or a pin in the area where the stem is attached.

Place the spices in the jars and place the tomatoes on top. Do not compact them so that the tender cherry tomatoes do not crack, but shake the jar from time to time and the tomatoes will settle with you.

At the beginning of the recipe, we said that this method is somewhat similar to pickling, and now this moment has come.

Boil water in a saucepan and pour boiling water over the jars of cherry tomatoes to the very top. Cover the jars with lids and wait until they cool.

When the jars can be handled with bare hands, drain the water from the jars back into the pan, and add salt based on the volume of water. Heat the brine until the salt is completely dissolved and cool it. To pickle tomatoes, you need to fill them with cool brine.

Now you can put the jars in a cool place so that the cherries can be salted. After 3-4 days, the brine will become cloudy, which means that the salting process has begun. Let the tomatoes sit for another 2-3 days and continue the pickling process. In principle, the cherries are already ready and can be served, but if we are talking about winter storage, the brine needs to be boiled so that the cherries do not over-acidify.

Drain the brine from the jars into a saucepan, boil it, and let it simmer for 2-3 minutes. Then cool the brine, pour it into jars, and now you can close the jars with lids and put them in the pantry. With this treatment, small tomatoes will not turn sour, and will taste as if they had just been pickled.

Watch the video recipe on how to pickle cherry tomatoes for the winter: