From SAVEUR Issue #141
When I was a kid, every pickle my father ate was a bit of a disappointment. Dad, who grew up in the 1930s and '40s in the Bronx, New York, remembered plucking kosher sours out of barrels filled with cloudy brine—"Now those were pickles!" he'd tell us. I only knew Claussen and other vinegar-cured pickles, the kind you buy in jars off the supermarket shelf, and I liked them just fine. But when I finally tasted a real pickle—the kind made the old-fashioned way, fermented with nothing more than salt, water, and time—I realized what I had been missing. A vinegary pickle plows through your palate with its tartness (often in a most pleasing way), but a live-cultured, salt-cured, fermented one tells a more multifaceted story. It is sour, to be sure, but it tastes of something more, something elusive: It's the flavor of Middle Europe captured in one bite. Keep reading »
Credit: Todd Coleman
