Pickles are cucumbers that have been fermented in a brine or vinegar or some other acidic solution or through souring by lacto-fermentation.
Then a whole bunch of words about:
History
Gherkin
Cornichon
Brined pickles
Kosher dill (US)
Polish and German
Hungarian
Romania
Korean
Lime
Bread and Butter
Cinnamon pickle
Swedish and Danish
Kool-Aid pickles
Nutrition
Serving
Etymology
Gallery of photos of pickles
links to:
List of pickled foods
Pickle soup
Glowing pickle demonstration
The thing is Yelp emailed me with a list of upcoming popular events. One of the events is a nearby pickling place that teaches the craft. Preserve the Harvest: Pickling With the Real Dill.
They also craft puns.
Turns out the place is just a few blocks from where I used to live. And I never noticed a place called the Real Dill.
Pfft. No wonder. The place is so non-descript it isn't even funny. And look at that lawn. Water your grass already. It's embarrassing.
Come on. How can that even be a pickle place?
Regular size jars that hold like 5 whole pickles but sliced, are $15.00 each.
They're out of their minds.
And yet some are sold out.
$60.00 for gift boxes of 3.
That's $20.00 each instead of $15.00 each, so you're paying $15.00 for the box.
Their selection is intriguing but their prices outrageous.
We're talking about pickles here, not caviar. There cannot possibly be a good reason for such high prices. They don't even water their lawn. They don't even care about curb appeal. I'm wary.
Their seminar is already over. Too bad. I was busy filling bottles with beer and putting labels on the bottles and teaching two dudes how to make pizza. But if we did go.
We'd start with a tour of the place.
Sample fresh ingredients.
Master the art of the perfect pickle in one afternoon.
Lunch and pickled treats to take home included.
A portion of the pickles made will be donated to a charity to support their efforts.
How woke.
Cost is $35.00 - $45.00
Good of them to narrow it down.
No.
Thank you for offering, but no.
We'll learn this without you and steal your flavor ideas.
I meant to say, we'll be inspired by your impressive creativity.
I saw something about pickle fermentation a long time ago. Like twenty years ago.
This video is not 30 min. They doubled it to fake out the electronic copyright police. I think. And the volume is too low.
That gives the idea, but maybe we can do better than that.
How did dill get the lockdown on pickles?
Same thing with salmon.
I can think of a million better flavors for those two things than dill.
Possibly ten better flavors.
I saved the juice from Bread and Butter pickles, stuck some cucumbers in it and they were great. Why the big fuss about fermenting?
You can slice cucumbers, soak them in water with vinegar and sugar and scant salt, and have a great sweet/sour pickle salad in less than an hour of soaking.
What's the big dealio?
Chef John with Food Wishes knows what he's doing.
1881 on the LifeBuzz Channel gives straightforward instruction. He uses a commercial flavor mixture. His approach is more careless.
Pratt Family Homestead, an enthusiastic long scraggly bearded guy, shows what he learned from a book. He makes sour pickles. He enlists his adorable kids.
Books:
Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon
The Art of Preserving from Williams-Sonoma
The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich
11 comments:
I was advised to introduce fermented foods into my diet and have been working through a jar of store bought pickles in recent months. It's slow going.
The ubiquity of pickles was one of those things I grew up with. It took me a few decades to finally realize that I simply do not like pickles and to stop eating them, completely. The realization came somewhere around the time I realized: (1) I'd eat pickles on a hamburger, on the side with a sandwich, and I'd put pickle relish on a hot dog but I'd never actually ever bought a jar of pickles just to keep in the fridge; (2) a co-worker would regularly have me bring back for her one of those big-ass deli pickles when I went to the local deli to pick up my lunch and then she'd eat the whole thing, plain; and Wawa (a regional convenience store) would put pickles on their hoagies as a matter of course and I thought that was inexplicable.
What? There's not enough salt and vinegar on that thing for you? Crikey!
Pickles, to me, are a lot like Tabasco sauce. You put pickles on something and then it tastes like pickles. Put Tabasco sauce on something and then it tastes like Tabasco sauce. I prefer my condiments to play well with others. Not to be all attention hoggy.
Hey, you!!! You condiment, there. Stop trying to make it all about yourself!!!
If you're someone like me who had one of those black lunch boxes when I went to work, sandwiches were the norm, and a couple of pickles/peppers on the side made the meal. Every. Single. Day. Monday. Thru. Friday. And, sometimes on Saturday.
Asians have a higher incident of stomach cancer because of their consumption of pickled foods.
I loved playing "pickle" as a kid.
Sixty-Grit. Have you tried Kimchi? It's the hot Korean cabbage side thing. I just now threw away half a jar becuse it's been in the refrigerator for like ... what? ... like years.
And miso is also very good. That hangs around in the refrigerator too.
Wikipedia, list of fermented foods. Tons of stuff from India and the East and Africa. Weird things. Too weird to even think about buying.
beer
bread
buttermilk
cocoa
crème fraîche
fish sauce
bonito fish flakes (I have two big bags of this)
kefir (milk)
kombucha (tea)
salami (w-h-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-t?)
sauerkraut
sour cream
soy sauce
yogurt
Tabasco sauce
Tempeh (like hard tofu)
Wine
Worcestershire sauce
Mostly from hot places. And this tells us fermented food was invented by accident and by carelessness, and by absence of refrigeration. Fermented foods are the result of humans sliding through life carelessly, taking risks with their food, having it go off during storage, or not doing the dishes, and eating it anyway, and surviving the experience, and then saying, hey, I think that helped my digestion a bit. All those invisible microbes down there pre-digesting my food for me.
I'm turning myself into a walking barrel of live organisms that are helping me digest my own food. Like a mommy bird that eats a worm or a fish then barfs it into the mouths of her babies.' Cept dif'ernt. The whole thing cuts down on my farting all over the place.
No hot food, no cabbage, so no, I haven't. Nor will I. A trip to the ER offsets any possible benefit to getting pickled.
It's Napa cabbage, the sweet, light, watery kind, not the harsh bitter gross kind.
I just recently turned onto Napa cabbage. It should be called something else because it's a world apart from green cabbage.
That reminds me - in the Outback Truckers series the drivers kept crossing the Goyder River. Goydah, as they put it, and I kept thinking "Add more iodine to your diet, mites!"
Pickle soup doesn't sound appealing. Probably better than kimchi though.
If I were told to up my fermented matter intake — without exclusion— I’d go for dairy in the morning and berry in the evening.
Yogurt in the AM; wine in the PM.
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