By Paul Biasco   –   dna info

LOGAN SQUARE — The Dill Pickle food co-op’s plans to move into a new, much larger home on Milwaukee Avenue have been delayed.

The food co-op, which has been growing quickly since its birth in 2005, had originally hoped to move into its new location in the early spring of this year.

The plans to move into the new location at 2746 N. Milwaukee Ave. are still on track, but it’s likely the co-op that will be more than six times the size of the current location won’t open until early 2017.

“That’s what we wanted,” said Kevin Monahan, president of the co-op’s board of directors. “When you set out on a journey you say that’s the plan I want. You have to be flexible.”

The co-op had planned to raise $1 million in “owner loans” from its owners, and is still trying to come up with that money.

As of this month Dill Pickle had raised about $650,000.

The co-op needs to raise an additional $360,000 this summer to begin construction to stay on track for the 2017 opening.

“I think it always was on our radar from the very beginning of the capital campaign that we had a very aggressive timeline and actually a pretty realistic total amount,” Monahan said.

Other food co-ops in Illinois who have turned to their owners to provide loans for expansion have raised similar totals, according to Monahan.

The owners of Common Ground in Champaign raised $1 million, and the owners ofSugar Beet in Oak Park raised $800,000, he said.

The additional funding to pay for the $2.5 million shop will come from commercial lending that is already lined up.

The project is currently in the process of getting the necessary permits, and all the engineers and store designers are on board.

Dill Pickle’s expansion will mean lower food prices and a vastly larger selection of products that will include beer and wine, a deli and a community room.

Since the expansion was announced, the co-op has had about 225 new people become owners, Monahan said.

Dill Pickle expects that number to jump once the new location opens.

“We need food co-ops in the city,” Monahan said. “The city has not had much of a history of good food co-ops. We need to make this happen. We need to build this store.”

Rennie Phillips

Scott City Musings

Back through the years, we as a family have consumed a lot of pickles, with most of these being dill pickles or sour pickles. I’ve eaten a few sweet pickles, but not very many. I just never cared for the sweet pickles. Marge has made and canned both kinds, but it still seems like our family prefers the dills.

We have tried recipe after recipe with some success and a bunch of failures. It seems like the sweet pickles turn out better on a consistent basis than the dills. Many times, the dill pickles end up soft and mushy. We have tried putting grape leaves in with the cucumbers, with a little success. Very little success.

Marge has made the pickles where you put the Red Hots in with them. Many like them. They are crisp when you bite into them.

Normally she uses big, overgrown cucumbers for these. She discards the skin and the core of the cucumber and only uses the solid outside part. I believe she soaks them in lime for a time.

It doesn’t really matter what kind of cucumber it is as long as it gets rather large.

A couple years ago we bought a book on fermenting cucumbers to make a sour pickle. The first couple attempts did OK, but the taste wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

I was a little hesitant about eating fermented pickles that hadn’t been run through the canning process. I tried them, but really didn’t eat enough to decide whether I liked them or not.

When you run pickles, tomatoes, green beans or whatever through the canning process, you get the veggies hot enough to kill any unwanted microorganisms that might be present.

Some of these microorganisms in an acidic solution don’t require more than a water-bath process, which raises the temp to around 212 degrees.

Some canned veggies, however, require a higher temp, so a pressure canner has to be used. I’ve had to do a lot of reading to feel comfortable eating fermented pickles.

We have been making a number of different kinds of pickles or close relatives this summer. One of our favorites is refrigerator pickles. Basically you can use almost any kind of cucumber for these pickles.

We have been using some European cucumbers as well as a Polish yellow cucumber to make refrigerator pickles.

We make them by leaving the skin on the cucumber and slicing them across the cucumber about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. We put ours in gallon jars. We fill the jar about half full before we add spices, onion and garlic.

We then fill the gallon jar with sliced cucumbers, along with the spices and such. Last of all, we fill the jar with a solution of vinegar, water, salt and sugar.

We then store them in the fridge and normally eat them for the next three or four months. Any cucumber will work for these.

Another favorite of ours is dill pickles. I grow particular kinds of cucumbers just for our dill pickles. This year I am growing cucumbers called H19 Little Leaf and General Lee. The H19 is a hybrid, while the General Lee is open pollinated. Neither of these is burpless. I also have a few Polish cucumbers for canning.

We try to pick these cucumbers on a daily basis so they are from about 3 to 5 inches long, which is perfect for dill pickles. It takes a lot of time brushing each individual cucumber to remove the spines and then nipping off the stem end.

By using special cucumbers we grow just for dill pickles, we have had good success with the pickles being crispy. We also have started using Mrs. Wages dill pickle mix. This seems to work as well.

Right now we have a gallon jar full of pickles fermenting on the counter. We used the small pickling cucumbers for this mix. We put dill, spices, garlic and three jalapeños in the salt brine.

It has bubbled now for going on two weeks. I tried a pickle the other evening and it was good, but on the warm side. I may have added too many hot peppers. I’ll cut back on the next batch.

Marge questioned me when I added the jalapeños. I hate to admit she was right.

Marge has spent the past three or four days making a mustard pickle that my Aunt Katie McMullen back in Nebraska used to make. You use small green tomatoes, onions, garlic, small cucumbers, cut-up cauliflower and a bunch of spices.

It is a kind of lengthy process preparing the ingredients and making the pickles.

I believe there are 14 quarts of these mustard pickles on our kitchen table. Marge ran all of these jars through a water bath to seal the jars.

If our ice box wasn’t so full of gallon jars and cut-up melons, I’d open a jar and sample. I may need to wait until some space opens up in the ice box.

Really, the most difficult part of making good dill pickles is getting enough small cucumbers.

Large ones will work, but the ones we have canned are usually soft. It takes a lot of cucumber vines to be able to pick a 5-gallon bucket of small 3- to 5-inch cucumbers.

If you want to make bread-and-butter pickles or another kind of sweet pickle, it shouldn’t be that hard to find the cucumbers.

Talk to some growers in your area. Go to the farmers markets. Check out the roadside stands.

Almost any cucumber will work, as long as it’s relatively fresh.

Happy pickling!

by Julie R. Thomson   –   The Huffington Post

There’s a feeling of sadness that occurs when one eats the last pickle from the jar.Pickles are great, it’s understandable to mourn the end of them. But what’s left behind in that jar ― the pickle juice ― is full of possibilities. It can be used in a number of recipes to impart its briny, pickle-y flavor to a multitude of dishes. So whatever you do, don’t dump it.

Dumping pickle juice is throwing away an invaluable ingredient.

If you love the flavor of pickles, then you love the flavor of pickle juice. And so naturally, you should be using it as an ingredient in your kitchen. From cocktails to salad dressings, there are a whole lot of ways pickle juice can help liven your recipes. Here are six of our favorites:

• Brine chicken with it.

  

  Skinny Taste

• Make butter even better with it.

  

  Noble Pig

• Use it to punch up sautéed vegetables.

  

  James Ransom/Food52

• Use it to perk up some bland potatoes.

  

  Cinnamon Spice And Everything Nice

• Mix it into cocktails.

  

  James Ransom/Food52

• Bake with it.

  

  Gather for Bread

By Samantha Nelson
Daily Herald Correspondent

When Blufish opened its third restaurant in December, manager Kelly Jang wanted to do something different with the drink menu at the Vernon Hills location and looked to Chicago for inspiration.

One of the ideas she brought back was to spice up the cocktail menu with drinks like the Bermuda Triangle, a twist on a margarita made with mango jam, fresh jalapeño and a rim of the Japanese spice shichimi, and The Waterford, a spicy and nutty drink with a mix of whiskey, lime and house-made allspice liqueur. Blufish is just one of the local spots serving spicy sippers as the trend heats up bar menus throughout the suburbs.

“I think restaurants and bars are really upping their game on cocktails,” Jang said. “They really want to do something different that stands out — not just your regular cosmo or margarita.”

Nick Roberge, co-owner of Geneva’s Barrel + Rye, said the restaurant’s beverage director Sarah Geist strives to put her own spin on classic sippers like the paloma, which she spikes with cayenne pepper.

“I think now more than ever people are doing spicy or infused, adding kick where it kind of works,” Roberge said.

At Sammy’s Mexican Grill & Barin Elgin, the El Diablo margarita — made with chipotle-infused tequila, orange liqueur, fresh-squeezed lime juice and beer — proved so popular that the restaurant launched a Las Bravas Margaritas menu this week, which features four more hot versions of the classic cocktail. General manager Alfredo Rangel designed the drinks by experimenting with his collection of 100 tequilas, often incorporating flavors he enjoys from food. For example, fish tacos with mango habanero sauce inspired a mango-habanero margarita.

Another popular sipper is the Hangover Margarita, which incorporates muddled cilantro and grilled jalapeño. It’s based on a Mexican tradition that eating spicy food can counteract a night spent drinking. Management consultant Victor Rangel, Alfredo’s son, said the drink won’t cure headaches, but it does win converts to spicy cocktails.

“The first time they come and they think about a cocktail with jalapeño inside they are kind of skeptical. But after they taste it, they see the balance between sweet and sour and spicy helps the cocktail,” he said.

Spice can be used to either complement or contrast the other flavors in a cocktail, said Alex Jones, head bartender of Mount Prospect’s Bar 145, where the menu contains examples of both uses. The Bulljala features Bulleit rye, fresh jalapeños, simple syrup, lime, vermouth and ice, with the hot peppers bringing out the spice in the whiskey. Inspired by a type of Godiva chocolate, The Red Hot Winter blends house-made Thai chili-infused vodka with Godiva white chocolate liqueur served with a cocoa and cayenne powder rim and topped with whipped cream and a chili pepper.

“A lot of people get kind of taken aback by it,” Jones said. “They see the cayenne powder and the chocolate and they’re like ‘I don’t know,’ but if they try it, they love it. You have to trust your bartender.”

A consideration when using spice is consistency, leading some bartenders to prefer spicy syrups to fresh peppers.

“I like heat in things, I’m a big fan of spicy food, but it can get out of control very quickly,” saidPunch Bowl Social beverage director Patrick Williams.

“When we make a syrup, we can control it behind the scenes, and if it’s too spicy we can add more simple syrup to the recipe.”

When the chain of bars was opening its sixth location, they wanted to make a signature cocktail using local ingredients. Williams fell in love with 5 Lizard witbier from Bedford Park’s 5 Rabbit Cerveceria and played around with recipes that would bring out the beer’s lime and coriander flavors. He settled on tequila and pineapple-fennel shrub, but “it was missing some element,” he said. “We were trying out different syrups and we use a jalapeño-cucumber syrup in one of our nonalcoholic drinks. We tested it and it came together.” The result was El Numero 6, the signature drink for the Schaumburg Punch Bowl Social.

The passion for spicy cocktails has also led to the creation of hot spirits like Fire-N-Gin, the serrano pepper-flavored gin Copper Fiddle Distillery in Lake Zurich launched last year. The spirit was inspired by a version of a hot and dirty made by lead bartender Travis Livengood incorporating crushed red pepper, gin, caper juice and pickle juice.

The customer, Livengood and the distillery’s owners loved the cocktail and wanted to make it the distillery’s drink of the week, but Livengood knew it would be too time-consuming to make on a busy night. He worked on infusing the spirit with heat and now you can try the Fire-N-Gin straight, blended with Bloody Mary mix or as part of the Mango en el Fuego, which also features mango nectar, triple sec, lime juice and cayenne pepper.

“It’s really taken off,” Livengood said. “We sell more of that gin than the regular gin.”