Uses for Pickle Brine, Part II

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—

Dirty Pickle Martini

3 ounces (6 tablespons) gin
1 ounce (2 tablespoons) dry vermouth
1 teaspoon chilled brine from fermented cucumber pickles

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.

 

Uses for Pickle Brine, Part I

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 studies show 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.