Homemade Pickling Spice

This homemade pickling spice recipe is a flavorful all-purpose blend of spices perfect for pickling and brining your favorite foods. Craft the recipe as written, or customize it to feature your favorite seasonings.

Pickling spice is a flavorful blend of many spices used for flavoring a brine when pickling. The complex flavor of the spice blend is slowly infused into the food soaking in the brine, often over a period of days or weeks.

If you do any pickling, canning, or brining I firmly believe you should craft your own homemade pickling spice recipe, or use my simple recipe for starters. Pickling spice blends can easily be customized to feature more of the spices you love and less of those you don't.

Ingredients Needed

• Coriander seeds
• Black peppercorns
• Mustard seeds
• Whole Allspice berries
• Bay leaves 
• Cinnamon sticks
• Cloves
• Crushed red pepper flakes
• Ground ginger

Use the quantities in the recipe card below, or add more or less of your favorite seasonings to customize the flavor of your own blend.

Mix the spice blend together in a bowl then store in a dark place using airtight spice jars to maintain the freshest flavor. Or you can use the mixture immediately when you run out of store-bought pickling spices.

How to use it

You can use your homemade pickling spice to pickle any of your favorite vegetables. To do so, simply combine an equal parts mixture of water and vinegar (white vinegar or apple cider vinegar) in a saucepan, using approximately 2 tablespoons of kosher salt per cup of liquid. Bring the mixture to a boil until the salt dissolves.

Add 1-3 tablespoons of pickling spice to a quart jar, then add your vegetables for pickling and pour in the hot brine. Seal the lids and place jars in the refrigerator. Expect the pickling process to take one week for best flavor, then enjoy.

This recipe was originally published on January 10, 2020.

Recipes using Pickling Spice