Pickled Herring Recipe

1. Prepare the Herring (Filleting)

This recipe ingredient amounts is designed for 8-10 Herring. So if you’re doing more or less, adjust the measurements.

Fillet your herring by running a knife on both sides of the backbone and doing you’re best to preserve as much meat as possible. I like to start the fillet process by cutting behind the head and riding my knife down the backbone to the tail. You should have little fillets from both sides. Be sure to remove any internals or blood after the fillet.

Pro Tip: Filleting Herring are difficult to fillet and can be messy. If you freeze the Herring for a few hours they’re much easier and cleaner to fillet.

2. Dry Brine the Herring

You only need 2 ingredients for the dry brine and that’s:

• 50% white sugar
• 50% kosher salt

In a bowl mix the 2 ingredients together. Then put the Herring fillets into a plastic container and dust well them with the brine. Put them into the fridge for 24 hours. This brining process will suck out some of the moisture from the Herring and firm the fillets up.

The 3rd photo below in this step is what the Herring will look like after 24 hours in the fridge. You’ll have a liquid solution around the Herring. 

3. Rinse off Dry Brine

After the dry brining process is over, you may still have blood or even some entrails on the herring. This is the step to clean them up completely before putting them into jars. In this step, I like to have a large cold bowl of water and a tray with paper towel beside it.

I pull the herring fillets from the dry brine plastic container one-by-one and give a gentle scrub in the cold water bowl. This removes any sugar or salt on the Herring. Then place the Herring fillet skin down on the paper toweled tray. Then take a paper towel and gently pat dry on top as well. 

4. Make your Pickling Solution

Below are the ingredients for roughly 3 Mason Jars (standard size being around 500 ml). That said, if you’re doing a lot Herring adjust the recipe accordingly. 

Add ingredients into a pot:

• 1 cups of water
• 1 cups of Apple Cider Vinegar
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 6 whole black peppercorns
• 6 allspice whole seeds
• 6 cloves whole

Bring these ingredients to boil, then simmer for 5 minutes. After simmering, remove let the pickling solution from the heat to cool down. You do NOT want to add hot pickling solution to the Herring as it’ll cook them. 

Tip: Strain out the pickling ingredients with a strainer into a jug or large container and put into the fridge to speed up the cooling process.

5. Fill Mason Jars with Herring & Extra Ingredients

Get your empty Mason jars ready (I’m assuming they are clean and sanitary), and its time to start adding our Herring fillets along with some “Extra Ingredients” (listed below). I use 5-6 Herring in each standard sized Mason jar.

Mix in the Herring with the small portions of the extra ingredients below. These portions are totally subjective and fun to play around with depending on how much you enjoy these flavors. Do not overfill your jars to the top, give at least 2″ of room from top of jar.

Extra Ingredients:

• 1 yellow or red onion (chopped into bite size pieces)
• Fresh dill
• 1 apple (cut into thin slices)

Pro Tip: When adding Herring into the jars, I like to roll it up a little bit so it makes a cylinder shape, which is easier to put into jar. I’d recommend rolling it up with skin facing outward, because it looks way nicer!

6. Add Pickling solution to Mason Jars

Once the pickling solution has cooled down (you do NOT want to cook your herring), you can start to finish your Herring jars. Add pickling solution to fill jars 1/2-1″ from top. Ideally, you want the liquid to be covering everything in the jar so everything is getting properly pickled.

7. Put Jars into the Fridge for 2 days

Put jars in the fridge for minimum of 48 hours before eating. The vinegar in the brine will decompose the small bones so you won’t even notice them when eating the herring pieces.

I don’t have a good best before date on this recipe to be honest. Most pickling recipes can last for years, but because I’m not vacuum sealing the jar I think that reduces the timeline. That all said, I was eating these Herring for at 2 months and they were all fresh and delicious during that timeframe.