I want to share these photos of an excellent stoneware pickling weight for one- and two-quart mason jars. Note the cute little knob handle and the holes to let the brine through. The weight was designed and created by Ken Albala, a prolific author of culinary history books and a professor at the University of the Pacific who somehow finds time to putter in his pottery. Do you suppose we could convince Ken to quit his other gigs and devote himself to supplying the world with pickle weights?
The dark stuff on top of the kohlrabi, by the way, is red shiso, wilted with a little salt. I’m hoping that the shiso will prevent any yeast growth while also turning the kohlrabi pink. If the kraut turns out well, I’ll post another photo later.
When you visit Ken Albala’s blog, be sure to see the post on Funky Dust Pickle Powder. Ken simply shaved some brined cucumbers thin, dried them in a dehydrator, and ground them to a powder to use as a sour and spicy seasoning. I may have to try this myself.
I made a day trip to San Francisco on Sunday for the Good Food Awards, a project I knew little about beyond what the website told me: The contest celebrates American-made commercial foods that are tasty, free of artificial ingredients, and crafted from produce that’s grown locally with a commitment to environmental and social responsibility. I was to be a judge in the Good Food Awards Blind Tastings.
The project is now in its fourth year, I learned. This year it attracted a total of 1,450 entries, from all fifty states. There must have been hundreds of us judges, divided among sections for beer, spirits, cheese, chocolate, confections, charcuterie, pickles, sweet preserves, and oils. I was a pickle judge. Pictured here are the pickles we tasted, coded for identification and divided into groups by region.
Some of my fellow pickle judges. At right is Brenda Crow, of Olympic Provisions, Portland.
Although we spent about six hours tasting pickles, none of us got to taste them all. In the morning groups of judged selected finalists for each region, and in the afternoon everyone rated all the finalists for all the regions.
I don’t know which pickles were the top scorers, but for me there were some clear standouts. They included a fermented bean relish; a smoky onion relish; kraut with a bit of seaweed added; cabbage kimchi made of leaf stems only, in a thick pepper paste rather than a brine; paper-thin bread-and-butters that were neither too sweet nor spicy and that curled beautifully on the plate; and a cumin-flavored mixed pickle in which the colorful vegetables were perfectly cut into little cubes. I look forward to learning which pickles win awards and, especially, who made them.
Chris Forbes and Todd Champagne, who organized and led the pickle section.
Most gratifying for me was meeting among the judges professional picklers who got their start with help from The Joy of Pickling. For example, Dan Rosenberg and Addie Rose Holland have a company called Real Pickles, which now employs fourteen people and sells fermented pickles through 350 stores in the Northeast. Todd and Jordan Champagne run Happy Girl Kitchen, a business in Pacific Grove, California, that manufactures pickles and sweet preserves, offers preserving workshops, and operates a café. I loved hearing the stories of pickling and preserving entrepreneurs whom I’ve unwittingly advised over the years.
Are you a pro pickler who doesn’t yet know about the Good Food Awards? If so, I encourage you to enter the competition next year. I saw room for improvement in various areas: There was a general overuse of hot pepper, in the form of dry powder or flakes. I tasted no pickled whole peppers and no fully cured sauerkraut. A few brined pickles were at the height of fermentation; they bubbled out of their jars. The fermented cucumbers were almost all oversized, and I tasted nothing you could call a gherkin or cornichon. There were no fermented cucumbers from the Northeast, whence fermented cukes entered American culinary tradition. Yet Northeasterners entered the only pickled okra I tasted. Where were the Southern okra pickles?
I have no doubt that the Good Food Awards will attract many more outstanding entries next year. I hope that some of my blog readers will be among the contestants.
In my blog post about Moldova I shared my daughter’s photo of watermelons that had been brined intact, and I promised to write about how to pickle watermelons in this way. Before watermelon season passes again, I want to share my own photos and a recipe.
I first tasted brined watermelon some fifteen years ago, when I bought a few slices from Guss’ Pickles, whose retail shop was a sidewalk stand on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. If you liked your pickles crisp, fuggetaboudit! The brined watermelon was soft and slimy. It seemed more tomato than melon. But its sweet and sour brininess grew on me.
Much later, I sought advice about pickling watermelons from Gwen Schock Cowherd, a descendant of Germans from Russia—that is, Germans who went to live in Russia after Catherine the Great, in 1763, invited foreigners to immigrate without having to give up their language or religious traditions, pay taxes, or serve in the military. The first of these German immigrants settled along the Volga River, where watermelons were a major crop (later, other Germans settled on the north shore of the Black Sea). A century after their migration began, Germans in Russia lost their special privileges, and whole villages picked themselves up and moved to the Americas—Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and the United States. Today the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those immigrants still celebrate their Russian-flavored German heritage.
I wanted to know how Germans from Russia pickled whole watermelons. Were the melons fermented or pickled in vinegar? Was sugar added, and were spices included? Were holes poked in the melons to let the brine penetrate?
The melons were of small, firm varieties, Gwen told me, and they ranged from green to ripe. They were always fermented intact. “Do not poke holes in the melons, or the juice will run out,” she warned. With no poking, “the salt water will penetrate the rind and thus preserve the melon. The sweet comes from the melons themselves.” As Gwen remembered, less ripe melons turned out more salty and sour than sweet. Each melon tasted different, because “with the rind intact you didn’t know what you were brining.”
Gwen sent me Mrs. Henry Lindemann’s recipe for “sour watermelons,” from the German Russian Pioneer Cookbook, published in Eureka, South Dakota, in 1975 (Germans from Russia and their American descendants have published hundreds of community cookbooks). Mrs. Lindeman would line the bottom of a 30-gallon barrel with dill, fill the barrel with melons, top them with more dill, and add 1½ cups sugar, 1 cup vinegar, 6 pounds salt, “lots of red peppers,” and garlic. Then she would fill the barrel with water and weight the melons with a board and a rock.
In Sei Unser Gast (“Be Our Guest”), a cookbook published by the North Star Chapter of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia in Minneapolis in 1996, a writer left the sugar, vinegar, peppers, and garlic out of her watermelon pickle but added grape leaves. According to Küchen Kochen, published by the Lincoln, Nebraska, branch of the same organization in 1973, some cooks scattered cherry rather than grape leaves throughout the barrel, along with hunks of ripe melon flesh.Gwen’s own grandma left out all of those extras but added pickling spices. “I guess you can spice them anyway you want,” Gwen said. As with cucumber pickles, there is no single right way to season a watermelon pickle.
Golden Midget watermelons
In the fall of 2010, I decided to try pickling Golden Midget, a 3-pound watermelon variety that had been developed at the University of New Hampshire in the mid-twentieth century. Borne on yellow-leaved vines, the little fruits tell you when they’re ripe by turning from light green to lemon-yellow. I figured their size would make them perfect for pickling. I used two of them to make my own version of—
Whole Pickled Watermelons
2 3-pound watermelons 2 tablespoons dill seed 8 peeled garlic cloves 6 small dry hot peppers, slit lengthwise 10 tablespoons pickling salt 5 quarts water
Put the melons into a large crock or food-grade plastic pail with the dill, garlic, and peppers. Stir the salt into the water until it dissolves, and pour the brine over the melons. Weight them with a clean rock or a plate or board topped with a water-filled jar. Be sure the watermelons remain well immersed in the brine. Cover the crock with a cloth, and let the crock stand at room temperature.
Check the crock daily, and skim off any yeast or mold. Wait at least four weeks before cutting open a watermelon. At this point you might move the crock to a cellar, where the remaining melons should keep all winter.
On New Year’s Eve of the same year, I cut open one of the melons. The flesh was glistening, tender, and red throughout. The melon smelled and tasted like a strong fermented cucumber pickle, with extra sweetness and the slimy texture I remembered from the pickled watermelon I’d tasted in New York. I took the melon to a New Year’s Eve party, and people tasted it with interest. For some a little taste was enough, but others ate big slices with gusto.
The next time I pickle watermelon, I’ll do a few things differently. Because I had to skim mold off the brine for an extended period, I’ll use a crock with a water lock. I might add a little vinegar to curb mold growth or some cucumber pickle brine to speed the fermentation. And I’ll add a little sugar, just to see what difference it makes.
My single complaint about Golden Midget is that its thin rind caved in a bit with brining, so that the pickled melons looked like partially deflated playground balls. But an icebox melon with a thicker rind might collapse this way, too, according to my Moldovan friend Cristina. Still, next year I may try a variety that Germans from Russia might have chosen generations ago, such as Astrakhanski, Melitopolski, or the white-fleshed Cream of Saskatchewan.
I threw out half of my first crock of brined cucumbers this year, because the cucumbers were strangely soft. Much more upsetting than the loss was the fact that I couldn’t explain it. I am supposed to understand such things!
Now I’ve figured it out. The spotted cucumber beetles have been more numerous than ever this summer. For a week or two, stepping into the vegetable garden was like entering a bee swarm, except that I could swat the yellow devils with impunity. Early in the season, many cucumbers were scarred from the beetles’ bites. These scars looked like scars, not open wounds, not rotten spots. I’d seen them many times before, though never in such quantity. As usual, I ignored the scars as I filled the first crock.
A cucumber beetle scar on another variety
The most scarred cucumbers, it turned out, were of the Agnes variety. In fact, few other cucumbers had any scarring at all. Nearly all the cucumbers I ended up throwing out were Agnes. Their skins rubbed off at the scar sites. When I’d press on a scar, the soft flesh below would spurt out. Where a scar had touched the smooth skin of a neighboring cucumber in the crock, the second cucumber sometimes suffered a bit of softening, too.
Agnes, developed in Holland, is always bitter-free, so I doubt that the bitter-loving beetles are especially attracted by its flavor. I suspect that they like this variety, or at least can most easily injure it, because its skin is especially thin.
I’m still pickling Agnes cucumbers, but I’m taking care to cut away every bit of scarring. And I’ll do that in the future no matter what cucumber variety I’m pickling.
Sauerkraut is traditionally made in autumn, when cabbages grow big, white, and sweet in the chilly air. The cold weather helps them develop a high water and sugar content, which in turn helps the cabbages to ferment well. But you can make kraut from early cabbage—that is, cabbage you’ve harvested in mid-summer. I did so recently, when I found my refrigerator drawers overstuffed with the little red and green cabbages I’d brought in from the garden. This was the perfect opportunity, I figured, to try out the airlock mason-jar cap that Richard Washburn of New Eden Farm had kindly sent me.
Devices like Richard’s have become popular among fermentation faddists, folks who will try fermenting just about anything, in small amounts. Many of these new breed of picklers are using little salt—so little that their pickles are prone to spoilage. Some people compensate for this by adding whey to boost the acidity of the brine or by using an airlock to keep out yeast and mold.
Richard makes his device with a standard little plastic airlock, available from home winemaking suppliers for a dollar or two. When the airlock is partially filled with water and inserted in an opening of a sealed container full of fermenting liquid or vegetables, the carbon dioxide produced by the fermentative microbes is released through the water, thus preventing the container from building up so much pressure that it explodes. By keeping air from entering the container, the airlock also serves as a barrier to airborne yeasts and molds that might otherwise contaminate the ferment. This is the same way that a crock with a water trough works.
Richard attaches the airlock to a plastic wide-mouth Ball storage cap with a silicone grommet. The cap fits both a wide-mouth quart jar and a wide-mouth two-quart jar.
One of my 1¼-pound cabbages, grated, would easily fit in a quart jar. I could even add some carrot or apple or both, as Russians often do to boost the sugar content of early cabbage. Since none of my apples were ripe yet, I chose carrots. I cut the cabbage quickly on my inexpensive little Kyocera mandoline, whose secret is its ever-sharp ceramic blade. I grated the carrots on an ordinary box grater.
Because the word sauerkraut usually applies to long-fermented cabbage, and because I intended to ferment my cabbage for only a few days, I will call it—
Russian Pickled Cabbage, by the Quart
1¼ pounds grated cabbage (about 1 small) and grated carrot (about 2) 2 teaspoons pickling salt 1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds Mix the cabbage, salt, and caraway. Pack the mixture firmly into a quart jar, and weight the mixture. If it isn’t covered well by brine within a day, stir ½ teaspoon salt into ½ cup water, and add enough of this brine to cover the cabbage well. Let the cabbage ferment at room temperature for 3 to 5 days, and then serve it immediately or store it in the refrigerator.
Using an airlock doesn’t erase the need to weight the vegetables; they must stay under the surface of their brine. So I added a glass candle holder, and then a second, and a third. The third ended up pressing against the airlock cap. A freezer-weight plastic bag filled with brine would have worked as well.
By the third day the sauerkraut was bubbly, and after four days it was lightly sour. There was no sign of yeast or mold in the jar, so I can attest that Richard’s airlock cap did not fail me. I replaced it with an unaltered plastic cap and stored the jar in the refrigerator.
Russians often serve pickled cabbage as a salad, dressed with a little sugar and unrefined sunflower oil. Adding sugar may sound strange, but the sweetness balances the sourness of the vegetables and the bitterness of the caraway (which you can of course leave out, if you prefer). Sunflower oil has a strong taste that takes getting used to, but it’s worth trying if you have a Russian market in your area. Otherwise, you can dress your salad with olive, walnut, or hazelnut oil. Or use your pickled cabbage in any way you might use long-fermented sauerkraut.
No, I haven’t been to Moldova lately. In fact, I’ve never been to Moldova. But my daughter went, in May. She knew exactly what sort of pictures I’d like to see. Our Moldovan pal Cristina helped me interpret the photos.
Beside the lettuce in a Moldovan market are grape leaves ready for stuffing. They are simply laid flat, sprinkled with salt, and then rolled together for sale.
Here are whole brine-pickled watermelons, and slices of pickled watermelon. Apparently I’ve neglected to report on my own adventures in pickling whole watermelon, so I’ll do that soon. The watermelon flesh loses its crispness and becomes . . . I don’t want to say slimy. A nicer term might be tomato-like.
Cabbage is pickled whole, too. Here the leaves are separated and laid in a mound, ready for making sarmale—or, “in the folk,” Cristina says, galush. These long-simmered rolls filled with rice and ground meat are the Moldovan version of the Turkish sarma.
Brine-pickled tomatoes, like other pickles, are sold drained. You take home as many as you’d like in a plastic bag.
On the right side of this picture are brined stuffed peppers. Though I included a Turkish version of this pickle in The Joy of Pickling, I haven’t made brined stuffed peppers in ages. Now I’m inspired to make some this fall. Most amazing here are the enormous brined stuffed eggplants, at left. I don’t think I’ve ever fermented stuffed eggplants, and I can’t conceive of using—or eating!—such huge ones.
Some plums are sun-dried; others are smoke-dried. The smoke imparts a distinct flavor that I can only imagine. In the right photo above is an oven for smoke-drying plums.
In the picture above, a woman is selling an assortment of homemade pickles and relishes. You don’t see the jar labels because there aren’t any. The jars are in various sizes and shapes because they formerly contained various factory-made foods. But don’t her pickles look good?
At the top right in the same photo are plastic soda bottles filled with borsch acru, fermented from wheat bran, bread (preferably dark and a bit stale), salt, and sometimes lovage, for flavor. You use this sour liquid in zama, a chicken soup with vermicelli, or in borsch. “Once you use up the borsch acru,” says Cristina, “don’t throw away the bran. It can be used again.”
Here is a Moldovan well and, purposely placed right beside it, a shrine. In Moldova, wells are still sacred places, as they should be everywhere.
Finally, on the Orthodox Easter table is a bottle of cognac. In Moldova cognac is not fancy French brandy but green-walnut liqueur, like the Italian nocino. Have you picked your own green walnuts this year? If you can still pierce the walnuts to the center with a needle, it’s not too late to make green-walnut liqueur.
While making space in my overstuffed refrigerator last week, I chopped a last slice of brined lemon, tossed it into the bean soup bubbling on the stove, and began to tip the jar of brine into the sink. But I couldn’t resist the scent of that lemony liquid. If cucumber pickle brine can make a good cocktail ingredient, I thought, how much tastier a drink could you make with the salty, sour, bitter, tantalizingly aromatic brine of preserved lemons?
So I heated the brine to sterilize it, funneled it into a bottle, and stored the bottle in the liquor cabinet for Robert to find.
He couldn’t resist. That same day he invented his new favorite cocktail, the Vodka Lemon Pickletini. Here is his recipe:
Combine the gin and lemon brine in a chilled cocktail glass, and stir.
The lemon brine, said Robert, “softens the alcoholic edge of the vodka, and the saltiness brings out a dimension of umami. The bitterness of the lemon oil fills out the taste, while the citrusy, slightly medicinal aroma excites the nose.”
You might decorate your glass with a sliver of brined lemon.
*Put whole fresh, thin-skinned, unwaxed lemons into a glass jar. Pour over the lemons brine made from one tablespoon fine salt to each cup of water. Weight the lemons, cover the jar loosely, and leave the jar at room temperature for about three weeks. Then close the jar tightly, and store it in the refrigerator.
When my friend Rose Marie first asked me what I knew about water kefir, I was baffled. Water kefir, she explained, was a culture for a bubbly beverage made from water, not milk, in the form of “grains” that resemble those that produce kefir.
I was skeptical. Was water kefir, like kombucha, another excuse to drink soda pop and call it good for you?
Well—yes, more or less. But I’ve since come to enjoy using what many Americans are now calling water kefir but that has gone by many other names in the past, including California bees, African bees, ale nuts, Balm of Gilead, beer bees, beer plant, and Japanese beer seeds. Europeans call water kefir tibi, and they maintain that it came originally from Mexico, where it is likewise called tibi or, traditionally, tibicos.1 In Mexico, grains of tibicos are fermented with pineapple juice or brown sugar (or both) in water to make tepache de tibicos, a refreshing, sweet, slightly alcoholic beverage.
Tibicos, or water kefir grains. The coloration on some of them resulted from using dark fruit syrups.
Rose Marie ordered some of the grains from an online vendor and brought me about two tablespoons of them in a little plastic tub of water.2 I poked them; they were firm, irregularly shaped, colorless and translucent gelatinous masses, averaging about a quarter inch across. I fed them some sugar and put the tub in the refrigerator.
Within a day or two the lid was swelling. I needed to do something soon with my tibicos, I figured, or risk killing them. I could put them in a jar on the counter with more sugar water, but I wouldn’t want those empty calories, and why would they? Surely they would prefer to have some fruit juice. I didn’t have a pineapple handy, but it occurred to me that I had dozens of bottles of fruit syrups of various sorts, left over from candying fruits or made experimentally. On hot days my kids sometimes combined the syrups with carbonated water from the grocery store. I considered how I hated buying those plastic bottles, and hauling them back to town to recycle them.
I was beginning to see some value in tibi.
So I began making my own tibi pop. The recipe is simple:
Pour ½ to 3/4 cup fruit syrup, depending on the magnitude of your sweet tooth, into a quart jar. Add a tablespoon of tibicos and enough water to fill the jar. Fit a lid on loosely. Set the jar on the kitchen counter. Wait two days. Strain out the tibicos, rinse them, and store them in fresh sugar-water in the refrigerator. Funnel the partially fermented liquid into a liter-size clamp-topped bottle, the kind with a ceramic stopper that’s lined with a rubber ring. Clamp the bottle shut. Leave it on the counter for two days, no more. When you’re feeling hot and thirsty, unclamp the bottle. Gas should explode from the bottle just as if you’ve opened a bottle of champagne. If the explosion is weak, reclamp the bottle and wait another day or two. Then pour a glass of the bubbly. Adjust the taste if you like, with an ice cube or a squirt of lemon. Reclamp the bottle, and leave it on the counter. Pour yourself more tibi every day or two until the bottle is empty.
Each time you open the bottle, it will be as bubbly as before, or more so. I’ve made strawberry tibi, Asian pear tibi, plum tibi, and even tibi from syrup left from preserving green walnuts (the last tasted a bit like root beer). My only mistake was when I left the tibi bottled too long, perhaps four days, without releasing the pressure. Between opening the bottle and reaching the sink I managed to spray every wall and cupboard and several open cookbooks with plum pop.
If you don’t drink your tibi every day, do remember to open the bottle daily to release the pressure. If you forget one day, open the bottle the next day in the sink or outdoors. Ignore the example of one tibi maker, who, after a bottle of his tibi exploded, stood at a distance from the others and shot them with a rifle.
In an article published in 1990, Jürgen Reiss analyzed tibi scientifically. 3 The grains, he found, are made of dextran, a polysaccharide. Within the dextran are, in a symbiotic relationship, three species of microbes: Saccaromyces cerevisiae (which is used in making beer, wine, and bread), Lactobacillus brevis (common in sauerkraut and fermented pickles and a spoiler in beer), and Streptococcus lactis (also known as Lactococcus lactis, and used in making buttermilk and cheese). Reiss concocted his experimental tibi with dried figs and other dried fruit, as is common in Europe.
This is what happened in the fermenting tibi, according to Reiss: The sugar level declined constantly. After six days the alcohol reached its maximum level, slightly less than 0.5 percent, and acetic acid reached its maximum, too. Lactic acid was produced “in reasonable levels” only after fourteen days.
I can barely taste the acetic acid in my tibi, but I can’t miss the lactic acid. When it comes on, after about three weeks in my cool kitchen, the pop suddenly goes flat and sour. It is now vinagre de tibicos, which is drunk in Mexico to promote weight loss, fight arteriosclerosis, and prevent heart attacks. Only at this point does tibi seem truly comparable to kombucha, a weak vinegar made from a solution of refined sugar, flavored with tea, and usually drunk when partially fermented, so it’s at once sweet, sour, and slightly alcoholic. Both tibi and kombucha are considered probiotic, tibi because Lactobacillus brevis is said to survive in the gastrointestinal tract. Tibi is different from kombucha in that tibi is slow to sour and, when it does, the acid produced is mainly lactic, not acetic.
Tibi is also much gassier than kombucha, though not as gassy as commercial pop. As a child I never liked those sharp-tasting bubbles or the violent burps that followed. But with the gentler gassiness of tibi I’m learning to appreciate the taste of carbonation. Yes, carbonation has a taste! Only a few years ago, at the University of California, San Diego, scientists discovered that an enzyme expressed on the sour taste receptor cells in our mouths is stimulated by carbon dioxide.4 Humans have been enjoying this taste since at least the late Middle Ages, when bubbly mineral waters from natural springs became popular, medicinal refreshments. Ginger beer, made from another set of bacteria in natural symbiosis, originated in England in the mid-eighteenth century (you can buy ginger beer “plant” as well as tibicos from online sources). Europe’s great appetite for both mineral and bacterial bubbly waters caused Joseph Priestly to believe he’d made a great discovery when he invented the first artificially carbonated water in 1767. Soon English and American pharmacists were combining carbonated water with syrups to produce our modern soda pop. Until well into the twentieth century, people believed that carbonated water of any sort, syrupy or not, would cure or ease all sorts of ailments.
I wasn’t fooled, though. I was drinking pop without dyes or artificial flavorings or colorings, pop that might please the bugs in my bowels, pop that didn’t require buying or recycling a nasty plastic bottle, but still I was drinking pop. Could I make it a little more healthful? I eyed the quince in honey syrup on my kitchen counter. This was March, and the jar had sat there since early December. I make quince-honey syrup every year by simply mixing a pound of cubed quince with a pint of honey (this and many other syrup recipes are in The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves). The honey draws water out of the quince pieces, which slowly shrivel, and soon I have 2 ½ cups of raw syrup, rich with vitamin C from the quince and aromatics from both the quince and the honey, ready to soothe any sore throat that arises.
Straining quince syrup
We’d had no sore throats over the winter, and now spring had almost arrived. It was time to strain that syrup, revive the shriveled quince cubes by simmering them in white wine, and make myself some quince-honey tibi.
The tibicos seemed to respond to the honey as well and as fast as they did to refined sugar. The drink turned out a little foamier than usual (honey causes foaming when used in jam making, too). It tasted strongly of both quince and honey. The quince-honey tibi was especially delicious after a week, when it was less sweet and noticeably, though barely, alcoholic.
Not olive oil but quince-honey tibi
At this point I value my tibicos enough to want to share them. Sadly, they haven’t multipled noticeably; I still have only about two tablespoons. Rose Marie said ginger seemed to encourage tibicos to reproduce, but mine didn’t respond when I put a couple of slices of ginger in their refrigerator tub. In Jürgen Reiss’s experiments, he found that tibicos reproduced themselves when fed dry figs but not when given other dry fruits (raisins, dates, prunes).
In my pantry I have dried Desert King figs in plenty. My next batch of tibi, I think, will be fig-flavored—perhaps with a little ginger added, too. After that, I’ll have to try a Mexican-style batch, with pineapple. I don’t need to buy a pineapple, actually. As I now recall, there’s a bottle of pineapple syrup in my pantry.
1. The best source of information I’ve found on tibicos in Mexico is Más Allá de Pulque y el Tepache: Las Bebidas Alcohólicas no Destiladas Indígenas de México, by Augusto Godoy, Teófilo Herrera, and Miguel Ulloa (México City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003). As far as I can find, the book is unavailable in any U.S. library or bookstore, but most of the discussion can be read on Google Books. According to this book and other sources, tibicos develop on the fruits and pads of nopal cactus, which may be the original, ancient source of the grains.
As American bartenders have grown increasingly inventive in recent years, some have taken inspiration from the pickle jar on the bar. The dirty martini—a martini with a bit of olive brine added—has long been a bartending favorite. But now, all over the United States, bars are serving new drinks with names like pickleback, dirty pickle, picklet, and pickletini.
Joe and Bob McClure, who learned to make pickles from their Michigan grandparents and now produce them commercially in Detroit, claim that the pickleback originated in Brooklyn, New York, in 2006, when the two brothers were storing early batches of their pickles in the cellar of a gritty bar called the Bushwick Country Club. The story goes that one of the bartenders drank some pickle brine just after downing a shot of whiskey, and he liked the combination. So he tried it on customers, and they liked it, too. Soon the pickleback spread to other Brooklyn bars.
In the spring of 2010, the world of cocktail journalism was abuzz with news of the pickleback. One bartender, T. J. Lynch, told a reporter that he usually offered a chaser of house-made pickle brine whenever anyone ordered Jameson Irish whiskey. Not every customer was grateful; “It’s fun to watch them suffer if they don’t like it,” Lynch said. He’d been serving so many picklebacks, he told another reporter, that he’d had to start giving away the pickles.
What’s the attraction of a pickle-brine chaser for whiskey? Blogger Jake Jamieson was initially disgusted at the thought, but he later found a pickleback to be “pretty excellent” with the brine of Claussen half-sours. Pickle juice “does a remarkably smooth job of cutting the fire off straight Jameson,” wrote Justin Rocket Silverman. Toby Cecchini, after following a shot of Old Crow bourbon with a shot of brine from a jar of McClure’s dills, wrote that the taste was “shockingly good”; the brine left “a snappy, savory tang that curled about the last remnants of the smoky bourbon.” Lance Mayhew, a Portland bartender, liked the “rich, umami flavor” pickle juice left on his palate after a shot of Jameson’s but warned that a pickleback with any other whiskey was “disastrous” (Lance drank his picklebacks along with light lager beer). In the Washington Post, finally, Jason Wilson concluded that that“brine and whiskey made one of those mysteriously wonderful combinations, and it doesn’t hurt that pickle juice is second to none in preventing dehydration.” If nothing else, then, drinking pickle brine along with hard liquor helps to prevent a hangover.
Since all that excited press in 2010, picklebacks and pickle-juice cocktails have become ordinary barroom drinks. David Buchanan, who suggested the topic of this post, says they are particularly popular in casinos.
Fermented Brine in Bar Drinks?
Apparently, the pickle juice in a pickleback is normally vinegar-based. Considering the growing popularity of fermented vegetables, I wondered if some bartenders had begun using the cloudy brines naturally soured by lactic-acid-producing bacteria. In fact, by 2010 Erica Christ of the Black Forest Inn, in Minneapolis, was making krautinis, using sauerkraut brine combined with mild frozen gin and kümmel, a sweet liqueur flavored with caraway, cumin, and fennel. I’d have a hard time getting kümmel if I wanted to duplicate this weird concoction, which I don’t. I’m more interested in fermented cucumber brine. How does it taste in picklebacks and cocktails? Are any bartenders using it?
A search of the Web didn’t turn up any examples, so I decided to experiment at home. Because I’ve drunk cocktails about three times in my life, I needed a more qualified taster. I sent my husband to the liquor store for gin, vermouth, and vodka. Then I poured him a spoonful of fermented cucumber brine, and he had himself a—
Combine the gin, vermouth, and pickle brine in a cocktail glass, and stir. Garnish with a small cucumber pickle.
That was delightful, Robert said. With his help I next devised a—
Bloody Mary Mixer with Fermented Pickle Brine Makes 8 servings
For this recipe, you want tomato purée that’s just slightly thicker than it usually comes from fresh tomatoes. The unreduced purée of meaty tomatoes, such as Romas, would be perfect. If your purée is thinner and separated, you might pour off the clear liquid and use just the thicker stuff that remains. Commercially canned tomato “juice” (unreduced purée) would serve well enough, too.
1 quart unreduced but moderately thick tomato purée ¾ cup brine from fermented cucumbers 2 tablespoons brine from fermented hot peppers, or substitute hot pepper sauce such as Tabasco 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce ½ teaspoon finely ground black pepper 2 teaspoons finely grated horseradish 1 teaspoon celery seeds
In a jar or pitcher, stir together the tomato purée, cucumber brine, hot pepper brine (or hot pepper sauce), Worcestershire sauce, and black pepper. Tie the horseradish and celery seeds in a spice bag or scrap of cheesecloth, and immerse it in the mixture. Cover the container, and refrigerate it for one to two days.
When you’re ready to serve the drinks, squeeze and remove the spice bag, and stir the mixer. Fill each highball glass halfway with ice. Add 2 ounces (1/4 cup) of vodka and 4 ounces (1/2 cup) of Bloody Mary mixer to each glass. Stir, garnish with a long pickle spear, and serve.
I would have liked this drink well enough, I think, without the vodka. Robert had to empty my glass after finishing his own.
Now the question is this: Does the probiotic bacteria in the pickle brine survive the poisonous alcohol long enough to do your tummy any good? Only Robert’s intestinal flora know for sure.
What do you do with the brine when you empty your pickle jar? At my house, we go through so many pickles that I often guiltily dump the brine down the drain.
Pickle brine has seldom gone to waste in Eastern Europe. Russians have long used it as a wrinkle-preventing skin treatment. In A Taste of Russia, Darra Goldstein writes that her grandmother rubbed pickle brine into her unlined face every morning. In Polish Heritage Cookery, Robert and Maria Strybel offer various Polish recipes that call for pickle brine, including a barszcz (borscht) made of grated pickles sautéed in butter and combined with bouillon, smoked kielbasa, grated baked beets, and sour cream, and another soup of pickles, potatoes, and pork stock with sour cream. Pickle brine is a traditional Polish hangover remedy as well, say the Strybels: Fill a glass with equal parts chilled pickle brine and ice-cold club soda, and drink the mixture down at once.
Goldstein and the Strybels are referring, of course, to fermented pickles, which are suddenly more popular than ever before in the United States. Like many of today’s fermentation faddists, chef Monica Corrado believes that the lactobacilli in pickle brine can keep a person healthy. “So if you get a stomach ache or a flu bug, DRINK your probiotics! . . . Don’t get (or give) a flu shot! DRINK the (FERMENTED) PICKLE JUICE!!!”
Most pickles consumed in America, of course, aren’t fermented at all; the pickles are simply bathed in flavored vinegar. Are vinegar brines good for you, too? Recent studiesshow that vinegar both reduces appetite and, in people with diabetes or insulin resistance, lowers blood sugar after meals. Tradition credits vinegar with many more medicinal uses. According to Emily Thacker, author of The Vinegar Book, cider vinegar externally applied is said to preserve hair color, conquer the frizzies, end dandruff, soothe aching feet, cure fungal infections, and relieve welts, hives, and varicose veins. Administered by mouth, vinegar made from apples is supposed to cure a sore throat, relieve arthritis, settle the stomach, ease gas pains, cure hiccups, melt fat from the bones, and prevent food poisoning and ulcers, not to mention dementia. Drunk with water at dinnertime, cider vinegar is said to prevent nighttime leg cramps.
The belief in vinegar as a cure for muscle cramps has spread through the world of sports. Kevin C. Miller, a sports-science researcher at North Dakota State University, found that a quarter of athletic trainers have used “pickle juice” to treat muscle cramps. This “juice” needn’t come from pressed apples at all; Miller and his colleagues have tested the belief using the distilled-vinegar-based liquid from jars of Vlasic dill pickles. After the scientists electrically induced cramps in the big toes of exhausted athletes, they found that athletes fed pickle juice recovered 37 percent faster than those who drank de-ionized water, and 45 percent faster than those who drank nothing. Neither the salt nor the potassium metabisulfite in the pickle juice could explain this difference, the researchers concluded; the cure was too sudden. Miller postulated that something in the acidic liquid must have affected neural receptors in the throat or stomach, and those receptors must have sent signals that somehow disrupted the muscle cramps.
Or maybe the athletes could taste the different between pickle juice and water, and so the placebo effect came into play?
No matter—the faith in pickle juice in the gym bag has grown so strong that an enterprising Texan named Brandon Brooks is marketing a pickle-brine-like liquid to compete with Gatorade. No cucumber or other vegetable has ever touched this mix of water, salt, vinegar of an unidentified sort, nutritional additives, preservatives, yellow dye, and “natural dill flavoring,” and Brooks admits that “nothing on the package tastes good.” But taste is not the point—after all, how many people actually like Gatorade? For pickier athletes, Brooks is developing a version of his product made with pomegranate extract; a little sugar should help the medicine go down.
Another entrepreneur from the Lone Star State, John Howard, says drinking pickle brine is an old Texan habit. He likes his pickle brine cold—ice-cold. Having begun freezing leftover pickle juice for customers at his roller rink, he now sells his frozen Pickle Pops through the Internet, to Walmart, and even to public schools. Free of added sugar, Pickle Pops, his website brags, are not a “food of minimal nutritional value.”
Tomorrow I’ll continue this article, with the focus on pickle brine in bar drinks.
I want to share these photos of an excellent stoneware pickling weight for one- and two-quart mason jars. Note the cute little knob handle and the holes to let the brine through. The weight was designed and created by Ken Albala, a prolific author of culinary history books and a professor at the University of the Pacific who somehow finds time to putter in his pottery. Do you suppose we could convince Ken to quit his other gigs and devote himself to supplying the world with pickle weights?
The dark stuff on top of the kohlrabi, by the way, is red shiso, wilted with a little salt. I’m hoping that the shiso will prevent any yeast growth while also turning the kohlrabi pink. If the kraut turns out well, I’ll post another photo later.
