• southsamurai
    link
    fedilink
    221 days ago

    Pretty much no.

    There might be a way to process the pickles into having enough sugar/starch to turn into some amount of alcohol, but I kinda doubt it would work well.

    Cukes aren’t exactly going to make much alcohol before they’re pickled, not without added sugar to the degree that you’re actually making the booze from the added sugar rather than the cukes. Cucumber wine does exist though. Some people like it, and I’ve heard that it has been distilled into something resembling a liquor. But, again, the amount of sugar added to get enough alcohol to call it wine is enough that the cucumber is more of a flavoring than the actual fermented product.

    You’d need to rinse and soak the pickles for at least a day, change the water and do it again. You gotta pull out as much salt as possible. That would be after slicing them into fairly thick pieces. If you don’t get enough salt out, the yeast can’t do their job.

    After that, you’ll be left with pretty much tasteless plant matter, but it should be able to be pureed and used as a base for the yeast. You’ll need to add probably half the weight of the now pulped pickles in sugar. Maybe even 3/4 the weight since you’ve also lost some of the sugars in the original cukes.

    Add your yeast, keep it safe, and wait a week or so. Strain the resulting liquid, then put it back into a container and let it sit for another week or so. Some “wines” produced this way take only a few days in this step to have enough alcohol to taste, but cukes take longer, so I have no idea how long you’d need to go for pickles, what with the residual salt slowing the yeast.

    IMO, you’d be better off making pickle infused booze, or just mixing some pickle juice into your booze (which is a thing already, though I can’t recall the names of the cocktails, it’s been way too long since I was around bars and bartenders).