As we know, cucumbers are big news in Eastern Europe. They’re grown as a field crop, with mechanical harvesters, and the vast majority of the produce is pickled and preserved in jars for the coming year. In fact, in Hungary the silly summer season when, historically, there was little serious news is known as the cucumber season – when people head back to the family farm to get involved with harvesting and pickling. Even including white cabbage for sauerkraut and Chinese leaves for kimchi, cucumbers are probably the most pickled vegetable in the world. One of our suppliers is experimenting with field-grown pickling cucumbers. It could be one of the few benefits of global warming.
Grade out organic cucumbers
One of the many downsides of ‘fixed price’ (and weight) vegetables is that you do get a lot of grade-out. Riverford work hard to limit this but, with cucumbers, there is always going to be some. As usual, I’ve been losing sleep thinking about how to use up the grade-out cucumbers from the Riverford polytunnels. We can only use so many in our cucumber pickle, and they’re a little big for dill pickles, although we are experimenting with ‘spears’. My Polish-style Zupa Ogórkowa (pickled cucumber soup) got such a Marmite (mainly negative) reaction from my worthy colleagues that it ended up on the compost heap. Even thinning it out into what was essentially an English chilled cucumber soup, with a few gherkins mixed in, didn’t get them on side. I don’t think they really gave it a chance, so we might give it another go. We did a bit better with our tzatziki last year and that should already be back in the shop by the time this newsletter wings its way to you.
Our 2026 cucumber creation is a dill, mustard and fermented cucumber burger relish, although its uses definitely don’t stop with the humble burger. Flavour-wise, it goes down the Sauce Gribiche route. In fact, if you stirred in some emulsified hard-boiled egg yolk and the chopped white, plus a few capers, you wouldn’t be far off the mark, and a whole world of zhuzhed-up potato salads, asparagus and poached meats is there for the taking. If you’re anything like my better half, I’m probably not selling it that well, but I love all that stuff. It’s also particularly good with our chicken liver pâté. It would probably work well with other offal but, somehow, I don’t think ‘Good with tripe’ would sell it. Anyway, it’s available in jars and fresh from the fridge with the dips.
If your creative juices are flowing, grade-out mini cucumbers are available in the Staverton and Yealmpton shops for a bargain £1.75 a kg. In this weather, chilled cucumber soup (with or without a few gherkins) feels like the way to go. Felicity Cloake’s recipe certainly does the job and it’s refreshing, but I think it needs a little more punch, so I’ve been upping the garlic and chilli slightly and adding some fermented cucumbers or Polish gherkins, plus a pack of peppery watercress.
Continuing on the cucumber-meets-yoghurt theme, I’ve also been playing around with a cucumber lassi (aka Kheera Lassi). In this weather, our mango lassi is so extraordinarily refreshing that I thought a slightly more savoury cucumber version might hit the spot. Mint and roasted cumin powder seem to be the norm but, as usual, I OD’d on the cumin – twice on the trot. It definitely has potential though. Recipes are already out there, so I won’t claim it for Ben’s Farm Shop.
Ben’s Chilled Cucumber Soup
Ingredients
1kg grade-out cucumbers, washed and deseeded
500g grade-out cucumbers, chopped into 2cm slices and fermented in a 5% brine for 4–5 days
1 pot Greek yoghurt
1 pot crème fraîche
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
2 mild green chillies, deseeded
Small bunch of mint
1 pack watercress (reserve half the leaves)
Method
The method couldn’t be easier. Put everything except half of the mint and watercress into a blender and blitz until smooth. Finely chop the remaining mint and watercress leaves and stir them through before serving.