This recipe for refrigerator quick mixed pickled vegetables uses carrots, peppers, cauliflower, and cucumber. You can use any veggie you have on hand!

Quick pickled vegetables

It’s pickling season! If you love pickled vegetables but don’t want to worry about hardcore canning, these mixed vegetable quick pickles are for you. These are refrigerator pickles, which are simple to make and don’t require a canning machine or any fancy sterilization techniques. While you can’t store them on your cupboard shelf, they last for up to 1 month in the refrigerator…which is much longer than they ever make it at our house! We gobble them up too fast.

This recipe is an adaptation of our Dill Pickles recipe, but this time we’re making mixed pickles! This tasty jar includes cucumbers, cauliflower, carrots, and peppers. You can use any vegetables you’d like, and can likely find a good variety at your local farmer’s market. These two jars disappeared very quickly at our house. Ready to get started?

Quick pickled vegetables

What is quick pickling?

Quick pickles are any blend of vegetables that have been pickled in a mixture of vinegar, salt, sugar, and water. They’re usually lighter in flavor than regular pickles and need a few days in the fridge to pickle. According to The Kitchn, quick pickling works best with fresh veggies, not ones that are bruised or going bad. It doesn’t matter what shape you cut the vegetables into before pickling them. But some veggies are best pickled whole: like cherry tomatoes and okra.

Want more with preserving? Try our easy DIY: How to Make Sauerkraut.

Pickled vegetables ingredients

Many of the ingredients for these mixed pickles are spices and other pantry staples. For these quick pickled vegetables, you’ll need:

  • Kirby cucumbers
  • Carrots
  • Cauliflower
  • Sweet peppers
  • Serrano peppers (optional)
  • Garlic
  • Fresh dill
  • Coriander seeds
  • Peppercorns
  • Sugar & salt
  • White vinegar

Related: More Pickle Recipes

Mixed Vegetable Quick Pickles

How to make quick pickled vegetables

Making these mixed vegetable quick pickles requires no fancy equipment. You’ll need two quart-sized mason jars for this refrigerator pickle recipe, and that’s really it! Here are the basic steps (or go to the full recipe below):

  • Wash the jars thoroughly and air-dry them.
  • Cut the vegetables however you like. We prefer carrots and cucumbers to be sliced length-wise, but you can make them any shape you want.
  • Put the mixed vegetables into mason jars. It’ll take some elbow grease to get everything into the jars, but you want the veggies to be snugly packed in along with the herbs and spices.
  • Make the brine. Heat the ingredients over the stove to allow the kosher salt and sugar to dissolve fully. Once the brine starts to boil, remove it from the heat and carefully pour it over the veggies. Close the jars and refrigerate!

That’s it! The quick pickled vegetables will need to sit in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours before tasting them. They might need a few more days to properly pickle.

Refrigerator mixed pickles

Ways to eat pickles!

Thanks to their classic pickle flavor, these pickled mixed vegetables can easily be used in place of regular pickles. A few of our favorite ways to use these pickles are:

This pickled vegetables recipe is…

Vegetarian, gluten-free, plant-based, dairy-free, and vegan.

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Quick Pickled Vegetables


  • Author: a Couple Cooks
  • Prep Time: 24 hours
  • Cook Time: 0 minutes
  • Total Time: 24 hours
  • Yield: 2 quarts 1x

Description

This recipe for refrigerator quick mixed pickled vegetables uses carrots, peppers, cauliflower, and cucumber. You can use any veggie you have on hand!


Ingredients

Scale
  • 2 quart mason jars with lids
  • 2 Kirby cucumbers
  • 5 carrots
  • 1/2 small head of cauliflower
  • 12 small sweet peppers (or several small bell peppers)
  • 2 Serrano peppers (optional)
  • 6 cloves garlic
  • 16 sprigs fresh dill
  • 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
  • 2 tablespoons peppercorns
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 3 tablespoons kosher salt
  • 1 ⅓ cup white vinegar
  • 2 cups water

Instructions

  1. Wash two mason jars and lids in hot soapy water, rinse and let air dry.
  2. Quarter the cucumbers lengthwise into four slices each. Peel the carrots, and cut them into sticks. Cut the cauliflower into florets. If using small bell peppers, cut them into strips.
  3. Tightly pack the cut vegetables into the two mason jars along with the following ingredients divided between the two jars: 2 whole Serrano peppers (optional), 6 whole garlic cloves, fresh dill, 1 tablespoon coriander seeds, and 2 tablespoons peppercorns.
  4. In a medium saucepan, heat 2 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons kosher salt, 1 ⅓ cup white vinegar, and 2 cups water.
  5. Once boiling, pour the brine mixture into the jars. Tap the jars on the counter to release any air bubbles and top off the jar with extra water if any vegetables are exposed.
  6. Place the lids on the jars and screw on the rings until they are tight. Leave the jars in the refrigerator for 24 hours before tasting. The pickles last up to one month refrigerated.
  • Category: Side Dish
  • Method: Pickling
  • Cuisine: American

Keywords: quick pickles, refrigerator pickles, how to make pickles, pickled vegetables

Looking for more homemade pickle recipes?

Last updated July 2020

About the authors

Sonja & Alex

Meet Sonja and Alex Overhiser: Husband and wife. Expert home cooks. Authors of recipes you'll want to make again and again.

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32 Comments

  1. Those are so beautiful they are frame-worthy! I think I could eat the whole jar in one sitting. Especially the cauliflower. Yum!

  2. It’s funny how certain vegetables have a ‘reputation’ for being good pickled: cornichons, onion etc…. I’d never have thought about pickled cauliflower. But why not?! Beautiful photo – am feeling inspired to crack out the kilner jars!

  3. These jars looked so stunning that I was immediately inspired to make my own. Can’t wait for the 24 hours to be up to try the pickles! :)

      1. Surprisingly I had just about everything on hand. The only thing I changed was to use baby marrows (small zucchinis) instead of the Kirby cucumbers.

        The pickles taste so good! A perfect snack :) I prefer the more crunchy veggies, so I think I’ll up those in the next (of many) batches.

        1. Wow these are so good, I had a practice run and they are so tasty I’m entering them into my local produce show

  4. Hi there
    I found your blog only recently (through your recent collaboration with Naturally Ella – I LOVED your pizza party pictures) and adore your place in cyberspace already.
    As a busy parent I am always after quick and delicious recipes and this one here is perfect. Thanks so much for sharing.
    Kimberly

  5. I’ve been a pickling and canning fool this summer, and it’s been lots of fun! In my limited experience, things seem to be crisper before canning, so in future I plan to refrigerate as much as space will allow and can the rest. In short, refrigerator pickles are awesome!

    1. When we bought them they were billed as small bell peppers – perhaps gypsy pepper is another name?

  6. Nice and unexpected contribution for a casual bbq at a friends or a potluck dinner ! The best thing is you can make them in the middle of a cold Cdn. winter when the garden is closed down but the grocers has beautiful produce available.

  7. Just what I was looking for!! My kids loved quick pickled veggies and I wanted to find a recipe for mixed veggies. Question….do you find that some veggies need to be blanched before pickling?

    1. Hi there! We didn’t blanch any of the veggies in our recipe, even the cauliflower, and they turned out great! Was there a specific vegetable you were worried about?

  8. I do think that 3Tablesppons of salt is too much for this amount of liquid, I cut it down to 2 TBLS and it was STILL overly salty- are you sure about the amount? I was so disappointed as preparing the vegetables was quite time consuming. Think about it, that’s almost 1 Tblsp of salt per cup of liquid.

  9. Upon others advice I backed off on the salt. Big mistake. Also I had to use a lot more vinegar it was like water after a few days. So I drained off about a third of the liquid and added more vinegar. I recommend equal parts water and vinegar.

  10. Hi Sonja and Alex, Thank you so much for this recipe! i loved it!! and also my family too! I always wanted to make my own pickled vegetables, and this was the first recipie i tried, and it came out perfect!! its really really easy to make and the result is awesome. Im from Medellin, Colombia (South America), and pickled vegetables is not common here, but i remember the taste from the ones i tried in a trip to united states.
    Since dill is hard to find here, i used instead a piece of celery when cooking the water mix, and removed it before adding the water mix to the jars. also added pieces of celery in the jar, to give the recipe this sharp taste that the dill usually brings.
    thanks again for this recipe!

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