Favorite uses for leftover pickle brine?

Cafe Society
1

I go through a lot of pickles. It’s rare for a gallon jar of dill spears to last much over a month and I eat a quart jar of bread-&-butter chips every couple of weeks. As a result, I have a lot of brine that I hate to throw away. To avoid the waste, I’ve been experimenting with ways to use it. Some of my notable experiments:

Either brine makes a pretty good salad dressing or homemade mayonnaise. Dill mayo in particular is fantastic on grilled salmon.

Roasted, peeled and sliced beets and/or sliced red onion (either together in the same jar or in separate jars) are great in b&b brine. Put the pickled onions on a good grilled hot dog and you’ll never go make to pickle relish again.

Boiled, peeled eggs are pretty good in dill brine but they take weeks to reach full flavor.

Lightly roasted cauliflower has essentially no flavor so it takes up the brine quite nicely.

What do you do with leftover pickle brine?

2

Keep free pepperoncini from Papa John’s in it until we’re ready to use 'em.

Pour it in Ramen noodles and add spices for sort of a hot & sour soup.

3

Use it as an electrolyte replacement drink after workouts. Seriously.

4

Pickle brine is one of the ingredients in my coleslaw dressing (no sugar, just pickle brine, mayo, fresh lemon juice, and freshly ground pepper). Shred any veggies you want, use this dressing, thank me later (I hate sweet coleslaw).

It’s also my “secret” ingredient in what my friends swear are the best deviled eggs they’ve ever had.

5

Hey, Kolga, it’s my secret ingredient too! And for potato salad. But I only need a few tablespoons every few weeks, so I don’t think that would help the OP.

6

When my allergic post-nasal drip gives me a tummyache, pickle brine helps a lot. I think WhyNot put me onto that little secret.

7

My favorite use is pouring it down the drain. Didn’t really think any other uses for it would exist.

8

I don’t know too much about the process, but can’t you use it to make more pickles?

9

When I was much younger: beverage.

10

I’ve told this story before, so I’ll be content to just link to it.

Though that wouldn’t account for the quantities you go through, it looks like.

11

To a point you can but reused brine is going to make a much less flavorful pickle. It will take weeks for your veggies to take in the brine and they will be releasing their own moisture in the process thus diluting the brine. It can work but generally the results are pretty poor and the diluted brine can allow spoilage.

12

Chronos, full marks for ingenuity.

13

Loved it then. Love it now. I usually drain a pickle jar of juice by drinking it faster than I do by eating the pickles!

14

Pickle juice might be good in a Bloody Mary. But you’d have to drink a lot of them.

15

I use it to pickle fresh jalapeno peppers (which I cut into strips). Later, I use the heated-up brine to spice up tomato juice.

16

Not if you put as much of it in the Mary as I do! One jar of pickle juice equals about three for me.

17

drink it

18

Oh, I should also mention: I also keep a jar of chopped pickled onion in the fridge. It’s convenient for when I just want some onion on a quick hot dog or the like, but raw chopped onion wouldn’t keep. Every so often, I top it off with an onion or half (when I use a half-onion for something else). At first, it diluted the onion flavor too much, but I just keep the same brine and continually add more onion, so it seems to have saturated by now.

19

Chronos and I have the same way of thinking.

I should clarify–we think the same about the onions, not the cookies.

20

You could use it as weed killer - I’m not kidding.