West India burr gherkins are pretty awesome, and it's easy to grow an abundance of them. But, it may not be obvious how to use them. This thread is to enumerate the uses and benefits of West India burr gherkins.

Before I begin, I thought I should point out that they are filled with seeds, which are eaten with the fruit (which if someone managed to digest, might provide a lot of nutrition; you'd probably have to rupture the seeds to digest them, though).

Anyway, here are the uses that I've discovered:

1. Fresh eating. You may or may not have to scrub the prickles off, first, depending on how they grow in your conditions, on a given year. If you don't scrub them off, you should probably chew well before swallowing. The more mature ones have a lemony taste, which is really good, in my opinion. The less mature ones are more like cucumbers with a different texture. The younger ones take less chewing.
2. The old ones that keep for a while on the counter are really good cut up and fried in stir fry dishes. They're one of my favorite stir fry vegetables. The younger, softer ones aren't ideal for this.
3. Pickles. You shouldn't have to worry about these getting too soft like you would cucumbers. They'll still be chewy, much as they are fresh, except not sharp anymore.
4. Blend them up in smoothies. They blend up pretty easily, despite their chewy hides (and you don't have to remove any prickles before blending them up in a smoothy). They go very well in fruit smoothies, and add a nice tang, kind of like citrus does, without making it taste like a vegetable smoothy. The combination of West India burr gherkins, bananas, and frozen wonderberries, is really good, by the way (with most of the smoothy being West India burr gherkins); use about one banana per half a blender's worth of smoothy; maybe an inch of frozen wonderberries. Note that if you don't add any extra liquid, they're harder to blend up than if there's something juicy already in the smoothy (so, I just press the mix button repeatedly, in that case, and move them around if they get stuck, and it works decently; I don't have to do that during the whole process, as they have juice in themselves). I do blend them up as thoroughly as I can, to try to blend up as many seeds as possible (but it doesn't rupture 100% of them).

Anyway, using them in smoothies seems to be the most practical use that I've discovered for them, if you want to eat a lot of them, anyway. It's probably the easiest way to eat very many of them, too. Using the old keeping ones in stir fry is an excellent use of them, however (it's just not as easy to determine right away which ones those will be, while you can throw any of them willy nilly into a blender).

I tried approximately the same smoothy recipe with blueberries instead of wonderberries. I have to say I much prefer the wonderberries in this case, although it's not bad with blueberries. There's somewhat of a green taste from the burr gherkins when blueberries are used, but it's not very noticeable after the first couple tastes. I didn't notice any of that taste with the wonderberries, and I used less wonderberries by volume, too. Very curious.

So, I've used up all our burr gherkins that I harvested this year. There are probably more outside to pick.

I grew those a few years ago, and got a lot of them, but they stopped producing back in August - sort of like what those bitter melons do. This, I figured, was related to the length of the day, though both would eventually start producing a few more, that would ripen much smaller, which I figured was their reaction to the cool nights, to put out one batch of seeds before the winter.

I like theidea of the smoothies, since I don't have to rub all the spines off! I made gazpago with them, for the same reason. It would take about 8 of them to 3 lbs of tomatoes, plus all of the rest of the ingredients.

[mention]pepperhead212[/mention]

Cool. How did the gazpago turn out? Speaking of tomatoes, I had a smoothy with West India burr gherkins and a big Summer of Love tomato, ripened indoors, with some brown sugar added; that was actually pretty good, too. Without the brown sugar, the tomato taste dominated almost exclusively, and it was kind of sour; with brown sugar, it didn't taste like tomato; more like some kind of melon or such (I think that taste was from the West India burr gherkins).

I don't know about how the day length affects them. For me, they seem to fruit all season long, unless I don't harvest them (then they wait until I do to produce more). The more I pick them, the more they produce. If I wait a while to harvest, they take longer to start producing more than if I harvest regularly.

I've noticed they produce a lot better with black plastic to warm the soil, and are more vigorous, too. I'm guessing it's warm in the West Indies!

I wonder if the spikiness would deter wildlife, like deer and squirrels. The vines are kind of spiny, too. So, I've found it's good to harvest with both long sleeves and gloves, if I'm going to be harvesting many at a time.

The ones I grew were in bucket sized SIPs, and, like regular cukes, they produced like crazy in those.

The gazpacho was like any other - I usually put 2 medium sized cukes in with 3 lbs tomatoes, and the 8 gherkins seemed like about the same amount. And it tasted about the same as any.

I call them 'spiny cucumbers', When I shared them with a lady that I garden for, she called them maxixie (ma-she-she).
I'm making cucumber sandwiches... I also graze on them out in the garden... I prefer them less mature... I think the older ones have an off taste...
I also dice them into my potato salad, and even into ramen noodles and chicken soup.
The chickens love the vines, they are eating the leaves... last year, after the frost, they gobbled up the fruit as fast as they could swallow them.

There is a new gherkin cultivar being circulated, "Liso Calcutta", that has far fewer spines & is slower to develop seeds. At one point I grew both Liso Calcutta & West India Gherkin, but only Liso Calcutta for the last few years. It appears to have the potential to be even more spineless; I've been selecting the smoothest for several generations, and a few were completely smooth this year (I let some of those go for seed). The vines slowed down in September, but kept producing in smaller numbers until frost. I should mention that the vines root along their length, and hug the ground tightly... so tightly I was able to mow over them with minimal damage. The weeds got away from me. These make really great crunchy pickles.