I make pickles a lot, and I want to say the base I use is
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup of white vinegar
1/2 tablespoon kosher salt/pickling salt
1/2 to 1 tsp of white sugar
1 tsp peppercorns
1/2 tsp mustard seed
2 gloves garlic, smashed
3-ish Kirby Cucumbers
heat it to dissolve the salt and sugar, pour over the cucumbers/vegetables, let it come to room temp uncovered, put in the fridge for 8-24 hours, eat.
and then play with it from there (i usually add celery and coriander seed as well to basic garlic pickles). Sometimes I put in Dill and red pepper flake. I almost always toss in one Jalapeno sliced into coins. Recently I made some carrots this way with gochugaru pepper and honey instead of white sugar. You can probably up the salt safely to 1 to 1/5 tablespoons if youre using Kosher. The last batch i made I diced half a shallot and added oregano and a tablespoon of the gochugaru pepper and used rice wine vinegar, turned out pretty well.
The base is really the water, vinegar, salt and sweetener. You can choose your own adventure with the vinegar, depending on the vegetable or other spices you are adding. I put mustard seed in pretty much everything as it imparts roughly 0 mustard flavor, but keeps things crispy and a little bit of the heat you would find in a good ground mustard. I think most recipes keep the salt and sugar relatively balanced as a baseline, but I always like it more of a 60/40 in favor of the salt rather than a 1:1 (although I found I reverse my ratio when pickling onions/radishes/other things that are pretty strong on their own and want more sugar)
www.southernplate.com
