Valley Bounty: Pickles

Pickles

Pickles provide a refreshing counterpoint to warm winter foods, and they’re easy to make — this time of year, possible ingredients include radishes, turnips, onions, carrots or cabbage.

Quick vinegar pickles can be ready to eat in a few hours. Try them out by thinly slicing a red onion and covering with lime juice. Let them sit on your counter until dinner and serve with roasted winter squash, an omelet or a burger. Pickle ingredients and lots more are at the Northampton Farmers Market at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School today; recipes and links to local pickle purveyors can be found on the Valley Bounty page atbuylocalfood.org.

— Margaret Christie of CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture)   –   GazetteNet.com

New Braunfels Business-Education Partnership Career & College Fair Planning Underway

Chris Snider, newly appointed Chair of the Business-Education Partnership Committee, will preside at the committee’s first meeting of 2016, in Honors Hall at 7:30 a.m. on Thursday, January 21. The committee will review the programs the BEP currently sponsors and work on plans for the 3rd Annual Career & College Fair on March 8.

The Fair will be held at the Civic Center from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. BEP members are currently recruiting colleges and businesses to man tables and provide information for local high school students. There is no cost to participate in the Fair as a vendor or attendee. For more information about the Career & College Fair contact Rusty Brockman at the Chamber.

The Business-Education Partnership Committee acts as the education advocate for the community, acting on the recommendations of the Mayor’s Higher Education Task Force. For more information on this committee, or any of the Chamber’s committees, visit www.CommitteesInNewBraunfels.com.

– See more at: http://innewbraunfels.com/chamber/2016/01/18/business-education-partnership-career-college-fair-planning-underway/?ct=t(Serving_You_Issue_31_15_2016)#sthash.3jmcF4rE.dpuf

Scarlet Pearl’s Under the Oak Café gets it right 24-7

D’IBERVILLE — If you are playing a slot machine at the newly opened Scarlet Pearl Casino and hunger strikes, there is just one place to go: Under the Oak Café.

It is on the casino floor, and you will never be out of earshot of that slot machine you just can’t wait to get back to.

Under the Oak Café is the quintessential casino type of restaurant, and most casinos have a variation of this style. Most are open 24 hours a day, and all can get a pretty good meal to you in a short time.

 

The menu at this café is smart and imaginative; not huge, but it is diverse enough for almost anyone. Take the appetizer list. It is only eight strong, and it includes two soups, but it has some good food ideas.

At the top of the list is the Frickles, or fried pickles ($6), served with a house sauce. The sauce is a bit of a mystery, but it is good, and the pickles were delightful — crispy and light. Perhaps a perfect appetizer or snack.

We also tried the Southern Fried Mac and Cheese ($8), and the Fried Green Tomatoes Napoleon ($8). Both were good, deliciously designed; a golf-ball size round of mac and cheese, deep-fried golden brown. Wow! The fried green tomatoes were thin slices of tomato, battered and sautéed (I would have preferred deep fried), topped with crabmeat, cheese and fresh herbs. Good!

Our waitress recommended the burgers, and there were three from which to choose, with prices from $9 to $13; not bad for a good burger.

The flagship burger, the two-thirds-pound Scarlet Burger, touts three kinds of cheese, good beef, some of those delicious fried pickles and a fried egg. Again there was a sauce, but it remains a mystery as it is called only “special sauce.” This burger comes cooked to order, and they get it right.

Other recommendations our waitress assured us were crowd pleasers were the Red Beans and Rice ($14); Shrimp and Grits ($19); and the pulled pork sandwich ($11).

The Scarlet Pearl Casino is the latest shiny new casino on the Coast, and it is worth a visit.

We can’t wait to try the other three restaurants, buffet, Asian-style noodle bar and the grill.

How to make tumeric pickles

Tumeric is a powerful spice known for its natural healing properties.  Curcumin, the active ingredient in turmeric, has an anti-inflammatory effect and is also a strong antioxidant.

Tumeric is used to provide pain relief from arthritis, help with indigestion and heartburn, and to cure headaches and fight colds.  Over 700 studies have shown that tumeric can outperform some pharmaceuticals in dealing with diseases.

How to make turmeric pickles

“Tumeric pickles are a great way to use that herb and spice,” says Chef Nancy Waldeck of Thomas F. Chapman Family Cancer Wellness at Piedmont.

In a bowl, mix a little rice vinegar, red pepper flakes, Dijon mustard, sesame oil, turmeric and black pepper. Whisk it together, and add sliced seedless cucumbers. Finally, top it all off with a little sesame seed and green onion.

YOU LIKE THIS: FEATURING CHEF RICHARD GRAFF OF MEDDLESOME MOTH AND BEER PICKLES

BY ALICE LAUSSADE   –   Dallasobserver.com

Welcome to “You Like This,” in which we ask chefs two questions: 1) What’s the best-selling dish at your restaurant? and 2) What’s your favorite dish at your restaurant? We hope the answer to the first question will open your eyes to the fan favorites and the Dallas palate and that perhaps the answer to that second question will inspire you to go out on a kickass food limb once in a while. This week’s You Like This features chef Richard Graff and Meddlesome Moth.

Hey chef! What’s the best-selling dish at Meddlesome Moth?

As a chef, I am not usually too concerned with P-mix (product mix) reports on a daily basis and leave that obsession to the corporate management types. At Meddlesome Moth, I do review them occasionally if I need to fine-tune prep quantities or during menu changes. However, I prefer to take a more holistic “touchy feely” approach regarding the mix of dishes we sell. I get involved with what and how much the prep and line cooks are working on and monitoring the pass and seeing what is going out to the customers and talking with them, getting their feedback. With that being said and tasked with writing an article about our best-selling dish versus my favorite dish, I fired up my laptop and ran a P-mix report.

When I started as the chef, our hummus and pita plate was by far the biggest selling dish, week after week and month after month. The reasons were obvious: The price point and the ease as a starter in the shared plate concept we have at Meddlesome Moth drove the sales of the dish. In light of this, I was very surprised to see that our burger was now decidedly the biggest selling dish on our menu. In retrospect it may not be so surprising, as one of the strongest comments I received from our staff and customers when I started last August was about the type and quality of our beef.

A big component of my first menu change centered on using grass-fed natural beef from the local Texas ranch, 44Farms, and the ground chuck we use for the burger was part of that. We cook our burger on a griddle, which helps keep the meat moist instead of getting dried out on a grill, and our buns are delivered freshly and made every day from Empire bakery. Another change I made was presentation: I feel a burger should be presented in a manner that makes you want to immediately take it in hand and take that first juicy bite, feeling the juices running down the sides of your mouth. We had been serving the burger open faced (top bun on the side) and the customer had to fuss with it and finish assembling before taking that first bite. I felt it wasn’t visually appealing and the extra work took away from the immediate first experience. The final piece of the puzzle was the fries — after all, what is a good burger without a good fry? I worked with our purveyors on potato samples, as we cut and blanch our own fries at Meddlesome Moth. We found the potato we now use and then fine-tuned the blanching and prep process with our cooks for a consistent, crispy fry.

What’s your favorite dish at Meddlesome Moth right now?

My favorite dish at Meddlesome Moth would have to be our Hungry Farmer, a fusion of a charcuterie plate and a cheese plate. I like to “nosh” and have a hard time eating big meals anymore, which started when I became a cook and chef (I have to taste things all day) so plates like our Hungry Farmer are right up my alley. As a cook starting out, I was always fascinated with making house-made cured meats, pickles and condiments. It’s a lot of work, and the chefs I worked for were more than happy to indulge my passion, partly for the prestige of offering house-made items and partly because they didn’t have to do the work, which can be tedious and exhausting. We pick cheeses ranging from hard to soft and change them up weekly so they are not always the same. The only cured meats we source out are prosciutto di parma and an aged salami as these require conditions and space we don’t have at the restaurant. We rotate around various quick cure and cooked meats such as house-made rillettes of rabbit, pork and salmon, as well as duck breast cured ham, country pork pâté, chicken liver pâté and foie gras torchon.

I also have a mild pickle obsession and all the pickles we use except one are house made. Baby carrots, Kirby cucumbers, cipollini onions, green beans, red onions, fennel and the list goes on. Recently I have gotten into pickling with beer, which is a natural for us considering we are craft beer-centric. I just finished a batch of IPA beer pickles that were so good that after a little tweaking they might turn out to be a signature item at Meddlesome Moth.

Did you hear that? BEER PICKLES, PEOPLE. I cannot wait to order me a Hungry Farmer with a side of some peerckles. Go to Meddlesome Moth and try some of their house-cured meats. You won’t be sad about it. You like this.

Fermented Foods: Turning excess into product

By Josh Brokaw   –   Ithaca.com

Steps for creating a culture: First, place vegetables, fruit, or other live material in a bucket or barrel. Second, add water, maybe some salt. Wait for life to bubble up. If the life created isn’t one to your taste, change the climate by a few degrees. Adjust until desired results are achieved, or throw the whole thing over and start anew with a fresh batch of little organisms. Cajole and threaten them until they create something more to your liking.

This process doubtless will lead to a mythology among the microbes doing the hard work of producing your pickles, your kombucha, sauerkraut, tofu, kefir, kim chi, and any other number of “fermented foods.” To them, the humans who we credit for the work are capricious beings with the capability of making life flourish or falter in the barrel that is their universe.

“We’re the demigods of this vast civilization, just messing with them to see what happens,” says Anna McCown, self-described “pickle elf” for Crooked Carrot, one of several local makers of fermented food products.

Fermentation, like so many processes rediscovered as “foodie culture” has grown, has garnered attention from the national press over the past couple years; the style sections have written of bus-driving evangelists sharing their favorite bacteria on nationwide road trips, and Brooklynites begging their roommates to tolerate the pungency emitting from jars of kim chi under their beds. And the explosion in proponents of “probiotic” diets has also changed how many products with live cultures are marketed—bacteria, for so long something to be abhorred by hygienic Americans, are now featured by marketers, the presence of billions or trillions of the little things now proudly displayed on product packaging.

Here in Ithaca, it seems that even the most unusual of traditional food processes have been preserved in one pair of hands or another while the nation forgot how to do what grandma learned in her toddler days. Tom and Shelley MacDonald have produced fermented foods, largely from their own organically grown crops, since the early ‘70s. In their son’s Ithaca house, they once found an autograph book from 1909; on one page, there was an inscription:

“Where were you when the lights went out? Down in the cellar eating sauerkraut.”

Given the local land’s bounty in these parts, if the lights ever do go out, if the system goes down, Ithacans might have to give up imported delicacies like grapefruit, olives, almonds, or avocados—anything Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott is guilt-tripping progressives about might not make it in on the trucks anymore. But we can reasonably hope there will still be plenty of pickles and sauerkraut, tofu and tempeh, kombucha and kefir to go around.

• • •

The MacDonalds discovered they wanted to make pickles on a trip to New York City.

“We went to the famous [Gus’ pickle place] and tasted the pickles right on the street, and brought some back,” Tom said. “We thought ‘Oh, pickling, we can do that. We have cucumbers.’”

“And I was pregnant at the time,” Shelley added.

The couple had heard about fermentation from true believers during their time in Boston in the late ‘60s.

“Anything fermented was like magic,” Tom said. “So we knew it from a philosophical point of view—the idea we evolved from the ocean and crawled up onto the land and these salty, fermented foods are our connection back. We were very, very young listening to this and said ‘Oh that’s interesting.’ In those days you had to work hard to hear something different.”

Shelley and her girlfriends started making sauerkraut in 1975, and Tom eventually met the late Gary Redmond, founder of Regional Access, who MacDonald said was “the first person I ever met who liked [pickling] as well.”

When Joey Durgin of Ithaca Kombucha came from Philadelphia, New York to get a degree in exercise science at Ithaca College, he made a masseuse friend who introduced him to the fermented and carbonated tea drink.

“It was a perfect fit for me. It wasn’t too sweet, it had that tart and pungent vinegar kick to it,” Durgin said. “I felt a little bit uplifted—I wouldn’t say drunk, but there was a buzz element that made me feel at ease.”

The Crooked Carrot crew has its origins at Stick & Stone Farm on Trumansburg Road, where Silas Conroy and Johanna and Jesse Brown met and decided to start a community-supported kitchen as a business.

“The idea at first was to make ready-made dishes, that people with CSA shares could take home and they’d go with the produce—like aioli and bean dishes,” Jesse said. “But we were doing four different recipes in two weeks, which sometimes worked and sometimes it didn’t.”

Fermenting foods involves lots of experimentation as well, but unlike most kitchen adventures, the basic steps don’t boil down to heat and eat. If a historian ever writes a Decline and Fall of Pickle Barrel No. 49, Latin names will be as prominent as in Gibbon’s history of Rome, with Lactobacillus taking the lead role. There are vast numbers of happenings inside the ferment caused by bacteria, and at many points the fermenter can do little more than watch the organisms do their thing.

“It was intimidating at first—I thought this was a very delicate, sensitive process,” Durgin said of his first brews. “But kombucha as a brewing process is very hardy. As long as you keep it covered with a rubber band, use a clean container and let the fermentation process get going, it’s difficult to mess up.”

Interventions in the ferment do become necessary; largely the role is in saying to the microbes ‘You have gone far enough,’ often accomplished through refrigeration, which slows down their work to a standstill.

In kombucha brewing, the SCOBY—which stands for “symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast”—will grow as long as it’s allowed, resulting eventually in a vinegar which isn’t much good for drinking and anyway has too much alcohol, up to about 3 percent, to sell in stores under current regulations. Sourdough, vinegar, and kefir all require similar cultures to the SCOBY, and all present their own management problems.

Pickles, which became a mass-produced and distributed food in the 20th century, are particularly difficult to get right, if one is determined to make the vegetable process itself without outside help.

“You have to work incredibly hard to get pickling cucumbers right,” said Tom MacDonald. “From the customer point of view, the pickle is what everyone knows, and they have the most ideas about what a pickle should taste like. You have to get the pH down with the lactic acid and hope that two or three of those microorganisms that get in sometimes don’t flourish.”

A cucumber, pickled whole, that has started going soft and sugary on the inside can present a minor danger to its overseer, according to Conroy.

“If a cucumber is overly sugary, it becomes an active yeast fermentation rather than a lactobacilli one and it will give off CO2 and fill up the center of the cucumber with gas,” Conroy said. “We call them floaters. They can get to a point where if you bite into it, they will blow up.”

For the most part, the pickling process requires only salt, sometimes in a brine solution.

“In the case of kimchi and sauerkraut, the vegetable is so juicy it’s basically just salt added,” Tom MacDonald said. “People are always asking us at festivals, do you add anything? Well, no, we don’t. The microorganisms in and on the skin of the cucumbers, Lactobacillus plantarum is quite willing to start working and growing and functions in a salty environment.”

The MacDonalds closed their business, went to California, then came back and decided to start making pickles and sauerkraut again.

“We decided we had to make some for ourselves,” Tom said. “But it’s hard to get a volume less than five gallons to come out how you want it. So we started making barrels again, we started trading it, and then people have nothing to give us but money. And we said, I guess we’re back in business again.”

There’s something of a Goldilocks zone for fermented products when it comes to production size. Quart jars aren’t the best way to ferment; according to Conroy, neither is at a fully industrial scale, which helps Crooked Carrot’s chances.

“It does make it a very viable business for us, because it can’t be scaled up that easily,” Conroy said. “We do 55 gallon drums, and you could get somewhat bigger, but not a ton.”

Contrast that, Conroy said, with competing with your average California organic tomato maker—“They’re combining tomatoes and dumping into a concrete moat.”

The Crooked Carrot crew has no moats in their recently-moved-into processing plant on South Hill, the former Oasis Dance Club. Two of the team can pack up a drum of product by hand in a day. Not all of their 20-ish products are made in drums, but they did make 30 drums of sauerkraut in 2015. Conroy estimated they fermented 15,000 pounds of cabbage and over 30,000 pounds of vegetables in total over the year, with all of those drawn from farms within a 30-mile radius around the city of Ithaca.

Part of the Crooked Carrot mission, Conroy says, is to “absorb farm excesses.”

“Any given year, we’re sourcing some crops that are going to do extremely well—we want to be there to catch those,” Conroy said. Their curtido, a pickled El Salvadoran salad, is made of tender summer cabbage, which hadn’t worked well in their autumn sauerkraut ferment.

Over the years, Shelley MacDonald said, they’ve turned some of their Amish neighbors onto fermentation—which they’ve found to be preferable to canning.

Durgin has a different model for using excess, with his barbecue and hot sauces made of what’s essentially a waste product, kombucha vinegar.

• • •

Further experiments in fermented foods will surely keep coming from Ithaca’s fermented food makers.

Durgin said he’s experimenting with flavoring kombucha drinks, as he prepares to launch the drink for sale later this year. Flavoring kombucha requires a secondary fermentation with juice in the bottle, and his favorites so far include guava and passionfruit.

A new sauerkraut with wild medicinals has proved popular for Crooked Carrot, and their spicy kim chi was rolled out after the white variety because they thought the latter might have a wider appeal.

“We were wrong about that,” Jesse Brown noted.

And the MacDonalds have found that their turnip sauerkraut is garnering a following, along with a radish kim chi.

Contrary to national trends, none of the people interviewed here are putting the health benefits of fermented foods front and center in their packaging.

“It’s a pretty wide range what brings customers to us,” Brown said. “Some do say ‘I started eating them when I was five and they fixed every problem I had.’ Others care that they’re really tasty or unusual, or they care really strongly about local foods.”

“If you dig around, there are some really remarkable claims out there,” Durgin said, “but there is something to be said for us eating too clean. In poorer countries you don’t find so many autoimmune diseases. We’re not eating from gardens, and we’re not getting gut bacteria into our stomachs, and we’re taking antibiotics all the time.”

When the MacDonalds started growing and fermenting organic vegetables, they were well ahead of the current fascination with things microbial.

“We’ve always been interested in well-being and health. We’ve been organic farmers all our lives,” Shelley MacDonald said. “It helps give a lot of energy for us to work hard; there are long days of farming and making this stuff.”

Working just as hard, in their limited universes, are the microbes.

“They’re a nice little food processing miracle,” Tom MacDonald said. •

Cajun Kiss from J. Macklin’s Grill

By: FOX4News.com Staff   –   Fox4News.com

Chef Scott Hoffner from J. Macklin’s Grill in Coppell makes a Cajun Kiss. It’s a shrimp and cheese stuffed jalapeno pepper wrapped in bacon.
Ingredients
10 Jalapenos
10 Bacon strips
5 Shrimp
1/2 cup Jack Cheese, grated
10 Toothpicks
Salt and Pepper to taste

For Sauce
2 cups Sour Creme
1 Tablespoon Worchestershire sauce
2 Tablespoons honey
1 Tablespoon garlic
1 Tablespoon horseradish
Salt and Pepper to taste

Cut “trap doors” in jalapenos. Remove the seeds.  Cut the 5 shrimp in half lengthwise after removing tails
Stuff each jalapeno with half a shrimp and ½ tsp jack cheese. After stuffing each jalapeno, wrap it with a bacon strip.

Stick a toothpick through each jalapeno to keep the baconsecure.   Spray a sheet with pan release and put jalapenos in the oven at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.

Mix remaining ingredients on a bowl for the sauce.   Use as a dip either in a bowl or on the plate smeared under the peppers.

LINK: www.jmacklinsgrill.com

Recipes: Sweet heat wing sauces

, jlaxen@stcloudtimes.com   –   SC Times

Sweet and heat. Those are flavors familiar to almost every eater.

And if you are planning to make chicken wings for upcoming NFL playoff games — Skol Vikings, by the way — I suggest pairing sweet with heat to make your own wing sauces.

If you have a milder palate, the raspberry jalapeno sauce is the flavor pairing for you. Raspberries are a complex fruit with both sweet and sour subtle flavors.

The jalapeno adds mild spiciness for another flavor layer. The modest pepper typically measures between 1,000 and 20,000 Scoville units — the official scale of spiciness.

If you can handle a stronger spice level, try mango habanero. This recipe isn’t overbearing but rather has subtle spiciness. Still, be careful when handling habanero peppers.

Mango habanero is a common wing sauce pairing as the tropical flavor of mangoes is a natural pairing with the pepper that typically registers above 100,000 on the Scoville scale.

If you want more or less heat, adjust the amount of peppers used. For the hot pepper sauce in both recipes, the Frank’s RedHot brand is a popular version among many others.

Also remember not to cook the chicken wings in the sauce. You only want to apply the sauce after the wings are cooked to make sure you don’t cook out the sweetness.

raspberry jalapeno wing sauce

1 package (6-8 ounces) raspberries

2 jalapenos

⅓ cup melted butter

2 tablespoons hot pepper sauce

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons ketchup

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

one In a blender, add raspberries, jalapenos, melted butter, hot pepper sauce, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup and Dijon mustard. Blend until liquefied. Toss cooked wings in sauce and serve.

Source: Based on a Driscoll’s recipe.

mango habanero wing sauce

1 can (15 ounces) diced mangoes, undrained

2 habanero peppers

⅓ cup melted butter

¼ cup hot pepper sauce

one In a blender, add can of diced mangoes, habanero peppers, melted butter and hot pepper sauce. Blend until liquefied. Toss cooked wings in sauce and serve.

Food book: Preserving the Japanese Way lifts lid on pickling, salting and fermenting

Susan Jung looks forward to making use of Californian Nancy Singleton Hachisu’s book to finally make pickled daikon and pickles fermented in rice bran

I’ve long been fascinated by Japanese preserves but most of them seemed far too difficult and intimidating to attempt myself. I make kimchi, sauerkraut, jams and cured meat, and have dabbled in easy Japanese pickles, but miso? Never. Takuan (pickled daikon)? Nope. My one attempt at nukazuke (pickles fermented in rice bran) took at least a month of daily attention before I could even taste them – the bran needs to be mixed every day by hand – and was a miserable failure.

So I was thrilled to see Nancy Singleton Hachisu’s newest book, focusing on Japanese preserves; her first, Japanese Farm Food, is excellent. The Californian moved to Japan in 1988, fell in love with a farmer, married him and moved into the farmhouse built by her husband’s grandfather almost 90 years ago.

She writes, “Like so many, I took my mother-in-law for granted thinking she would always be there. But somewhere along the line I noticed that she was no longer making miso. I blinked twice and saw that she had given up on making takuan and hakusai [fermented napa cabbage]. They were easier to buy. I had my hands full … so put the Japanese pickles on a back-burner. ‘I’ll learn how to make them later’ was my excuse … But being installed in the family home meant taking an active part in extended family dinners during Japanese holidays, not just as assistant, but as co-cook. And through this transition period, I found that many dishes fared well in my hands …

“In writing Japanese Farm Food, I developed self-confidence in pickling, fermenting and salting, which had always seemed mysteriously Tadaaki’s [Hachisu’s husband’s] purview, not mine. The second winter I made takuan and hakusai, Tadaaki pronounced them ‘just like my grandmother’s’. Thus began my odyssey of Japanese preserving … All of a sudden, I was making my own miso, soy sauce and the most traditional Japanese pickle trilogy, umeboshi [salted sour plums], takuan and hakusai. All of a sudden I was a real Japanese farmwife, and it felt good.”

Hachisu’s recipes include salt-dried grey mullet eggs; semi-dried herring; brown rice miso; soy sauce-cured salmon; dashi vinegar; umeboshi; dried persimmons; shio koji; takuan; nukazuke; home-made soy milk; and sake.

Preserving the Japanese Way – Traditions of Salting, Fermenting and Pickling for the Modern Kitchen by Nancy Singleton Hachisu

Springfield: The Dugout

by Katie Tonarely, For the News-Leader

Whether you hit up Springfield Cardinals games or not, you’ve likely heard of the Dugout. Or maybe not. Though I tend to enjoy nearly all of the things the Dugout serves, and the occasional Springfield Cardinals game, the only thing I’ve really heard about the Dugout is that they have amazing french fries, and my cycling friends like to make it a regular spot when they’re out for a ride. Well, my ignorance on the subject of the Dugout ends tonight.

Put some smoke on those wings, baby. I checked the menu beforehand, and I come to the Dugout ready for some wings. I love wings. Everything about them. The flavor, the effort it takes to get that flavor into my belly and the different sauces that local joints around town feature. Dugout’s menu boasts that it smokes its wings, which make sense because it’s clearly a bar with a barbecue bent. And oh, my. I can taste every bit of that smoky flavor. If you like barbecue or the flavor of smoking, these wings are a must. I got mine in the buffalo style, and I dip each one into way too much of the Dugout’s delicious ranch. To make the buffalo sauce, Dugout is sure to use Frank’s, which accordingly to manager Kesha Bailey is manufactured solely in Springfield, which gives the Dugout that authentic Queen City feel. “It’s a Springfield thing. We smoke the wings for 60 to 90 minutes, three times a week,” she says. Plus, the crew uses a larger-than-normal wing to give customers more meat. I have more than enough to take to work the next day, so I’m happy to make those around me jealous.

Pickles for the pickle haters. I am a self-proclaimed pickle hater. Even when pregnant, I couldn’t ever get into the crunch or the flavor of pickles. Everyone always says, ‘Anything fried tastes good,’ but that’s not true for me with pickles. I’ve tried them everywhere, even at Galloway Station, where the appetizer is pretty famous. I decide to get them at Dugout, because Yelp is telling me to, and I’m pretty susceptible to social media peer pressure. I’m a millennial. Anyway, the Dugout’s pickles are spears, and they’re served with a made-in-house dill ranch. For real. As if creamy dips couldn’t be made any better. Let’s add dill and make it in house. Yup. The Dugout knows what’s up. Kesha says the fried pickles are made in house, too, and to order. “The pickle spears are covered in a Mother’s Beer batter,” she says. And on hearing that, it’s no wonder I loved them. I enjoy most of Mother’s beers, and maybe that’s the secret behind why this pickle hater could handle the fried pickles? The breading is light — Kesha says it’s more like a tempura, and I’d agree — and I still can’t get over the fact that a bar is making fried pickles to order.

Burgers, sandwiches, even steak with quality meats. For my main meal, I get the Green Chile Burger, because clearly wings and fried pickles aren’t enough food. The burger has green chili chutney, pepperjack, lettuce, tomato and a fried egg on top. The fried egg serves to cool the spiciness of the sandwich. “What sets it apart is the green chili chutney,” Kesha says. The chutney is made in house with jalapenos and pineapple juice. “It’s sweet, smoky and spicy,” she says. I agree. The real treat is definitely the fried egg, and I find myself dipping my sandwich in the ranch, too. Kesha says the Dugout crew grinds it own burgers so they taste fresh.

Pop culture to keep your brain buzzing. While I’m eating, there’s something big getting ready to happen: Sunday night pop culture trivia. I can’t stay for it, but I’m jealous. I love trivia. And on that note, I should also say that the Dugout has karaoke on Thursdays, which I adore equally, if not more, than trivia. Sports fans will also find a home at the Dugout. The team is devoted to the Springfield Cardinals and even caters for them and the away teams at Hammons Stadium. “We’re only 467 steps away from the stadium,” Kesha says. So this partnership with the players and fans just makes sense.

And speaking of the buzz, get your beer on. Karaoke and trivia are really just excuses to have fun things to do while drinking local craft beer, right? Yes. And the Dugout delivers. There are several options for local beer lovers. Tonight, I enjoy a Snow Drift vanilla porter, and it goes amazingly with my spicy wings and burgers. The Dugout has the feel of a typical hole-in-the-wall bar, but with amazing food that screams burger joint, not dive bar. Kesha says a big secret to their success is that their staff is small, so they get to know the regulars. “We welcome newcomers,” she says, “and we love our regulars.” I might not get fried pickles every time, but I’d like to be a regular for those smoked wings, pop culture goodies and great beer selection.

Chew on this

What: Dugout Bar and Grill and Sports and Music
Address: 1218 E. Trafficway
Phone: 866-2255
Cuisine: Barbecue and bar food
Hours: 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Friday, noon-10 p.m. Saturday-Sunday 
Price range: $3.48-$11.99
Accepts: Cash, all major credit cards
Services: takeout, catering
Parking: on-site
Reservations: accepted for larger parties
Seating capacity: 78
Family friendly: high chairs, booster seats, separate kids’ menu
Wheelchair accessible: yes
Alcohol: full bar
Smoking: on the outside patio
Information provided by Kesha Bailey