Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers Debuts New Fall-Inspired Menu Lineup

Fast-Casual Franchise Brings Back Pumpkin Pie Concrete and Introduces New Spicy Steakburger


Fast-casual restaurant concept, Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers, announced today the launch of its fall menu, which features a product lineup of bold flavors and indulgent seasonal favorites including the new Jalapeño Pepper Jack Steakburger. Back by popular demand, Freddy’s will also be serving up its famous Pumpkin Pie Concrete as part of the fall promotion.

The newest addition to the fall menu, Freddy’s Jalapeño Pepper Jack Steakburger is bursting with flavor and has officially taken the title of spiciest menu item to date. Available through Nov. 15 at participating locations, the Jalapeño Pepper Jack Steakburger starts with two sizzling steakburger patties and is topped with spicy pepper jack cheese, grilled jalapeños, crunchy onion rings and Freddy’s Jalapeño Fry Sauce, all on a home-style bun.

To sweeten the deal, Freddy’s one-of-a-kind Pumpkin Pie Concrete is making its return to the fall menu. The mouthwatering creation features fresh and creamy vanilla frozen custard blended with a whole slice of rich pumpkin pie, crust included, topped with whipped cream and sprinkled with cinnamon. Fans across the nation can enjoy this seasonal treat through Dec. 24 at participating locations.

“Our fall menu offers the perfect combination of sweet and savory with the return of the Pumpkin Pie Concrete and addition of the new Jalapeño Pepper Jack Steakburger,” said Scott Redler, Co-founder and COO. “At Freddy’s, we pride ourselves on creating memorable experiences for our guests so it was important for us to develop a menu reflective of the season that offers a taste of current culinary trends with a Freddy’s twist. We look forward to welcoming guests at our restaurants nationwide as they enjoy new and enticing flavors all season long.”

Co-founded in 2002 by Scott Redler and Bill, Randy and Freddy Simon, Freddy’s opened its first location in Wichita, Kansas, offering a unique combination of cooked-to-order steakburgers, Chicago dogs, and other savory items along with its signature desserts prepared with premium frozen custard churned fresh throughout the day. Today, 272 Freddy’s restaurants serve a total of 30 states across the nation from California to PennsylvaniaVirginia and down the east coast states to Florida. Franchise opportunities remain in markets such as the West Coast, upper Midwest and Northeast. In 2017, Freddy’s has been named for a fifth time to Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 list (ranked #41), and has, for the fourth year in a row, been included as one of the top 10 on Franchise Times magazine’s Fast & Serious list. Other notable accomplishments include several consecutive years on Inc. Magazine’s 500/5000 list of “Fastest-Growing Private Companies,” a feature on Consumer Reports’® lists of best burgers, cleanest fast-food restaurants and those with the best service last published in 2014, and first-place winner of many local newspaper readers’ choice categories throughout the U.S. including Best Burger, Best Fries, Best Hot Dog and Best Dessert.

Inside the Family-Owned Garland Factory That Keeps Dallas Restaurants Swimming in Pickles

A burger and fried green beans platter from Twisted Root Burger Co. includes essential Hunn family pickles.
Nick Rallo

All-American is a series that looks at beloved, longstanding North Texas eateries and examines their histories while exploring how the food has changed — for the good or bad — over the years.

Two thousand pounds of West Texas cucumbers tumble into a hot tub. Jets of water jostle them around; they look like forest-green fish fighting to the surface for feed. The cucumbers are getting a bath, and next, they climb up a lift that looks something like an amusement park for cucumbers.

They go through the brush washer for another cleaning with stiff bristles. From the second floor of the factory, we watch as the cucumbers pile into a slicer, where hundreds of grass-green medallions pour out onto a steel shaker table. The shaker table — somewhere in between a thing you use to pan for gold and the game Operation — pops and vibrates the cuke discs around to allow the curvy cucumber butt-ends to fall to the floor.

The cucumbers pour into five-gallon pails, which get measured for weight, and a waterfall of brine fills the pails. Then goes the lid and the label, and about 2,200 discs — from 65 to 70 whole cucumbers — load onto a pallet.

There’s a briny, spicy, sharp aroma soaking the air as soon as you walk in the door of East Garland’s family-owned pickle factory. It’s unmistakably the waft of pickles: You could be blindfolded and know where you’re standing. This is First Place Foods, the quiet but powerful factory that has been keeping Dallas briny since 2006.

It’s a humble space, makeshift offices upstairs and the factory downstairs. The pickles, some a spicy bread-and-butter recipe created by president and head of the family Pat Hunn, some hamburger dill chips and some fresh brining cucumbers, will make their way to the front of the house at such joints as Twisted Root Burger Co. and Bob’s Steakhouse. One of the best burgers on the planet, the Grape’s brunch burger, has used a horseradish pickle customized by the Hunn family. In other words, these are some excellent pickles.

“They’re running one about every eight seconds,” says Collin Hunn, the vice president and Pat’s son, talking the speed of pickle pail production. It’s mesmerizing. A handful of workers inspect the cucumbers along the way, tossing the weak ones overboard. Much of this operation happens by hand rather than by machine.

“It gives it an artisan feel,” Pat Hunn says. “Frankly, we’ve never had the financial situation to buy a whole bunch of automated stuff.”

Hunn’s little factory will slam down lids on enough five-gallon pails to stack about 80 pallets. It’s easily a galaxy of pickles. The Hunn family veins flow with pickle juice.

Around 2001, Pat Hunn left his job in Big Pickle to start his own pickle company. His father, J.B. Hunn, got into pickles while working for Morton’s Food in the mid-20th century. The brand was called Wiejske Wyroby. When Morton’s pickle factory closed, J.B. Hunn bought the Wyroby name: He had the label, the recipe and the brand. He’d even purchased the wooden pickle tanks and deconstructed them, fashioning them into corrals on his farm in Celina.

“He thought there was a void,” Pat Hunn says, explaining why anyone would focus his entire life on pickles.

The Wiejske Wyroby model is what Pat splintered off with in 2001— he worked with a food scientist for months— to craft hundreds of thousands of his own Hunn family pickles. He’d contacted Walmart (he’d done business with the company for years before selling Wiejske Wyroby to Vlasic), which promptly obliged by selling his new family pickle. He started off his new family business with the biggest retail customer in the world — which turned into the biggest mistake of his life.

Walmart sat on the purchase order, waiting a year before producing it. Pat had hundreds of thousands of cases of pickles sitting around, gathering dust. He was forced to sell them salvage: It docked him hundreds of thousands of dollars, wiping out the company sale savings he’d made selling to Vlasic years earlier, he says.

After bottoming out hard with Walmart, Pat brainstormed solutions to save his business. Far down on the list of viable solutions was Garland’s Goldin Pickle Co., a ramshackle factory on the edge of town that sold industrial-sized relish.

“He kind of pretended to be a pickle company,” Pat says of the Goldin factory before it was his. He had visited Goldin on a weekday, and it was dark as a movie theater and nowhere near ready to retail pickles.

“They had a relish dicer, a pickle slicer and that’s about it,” Colin Hunn says. Pat went to the Garland pickle factory armed to negotiate and left ready to purchase the whole place. He left and asked his wife what he should do. As Pat describes it, her response set things moving for their new family business: “We’ve never been able to make pickles in our own town.”

There are three ways to make pickles: the pasteurization route, what’s done to pack the glass-jarred Vlasics you’ll find at the store; the fermentation route, your good, old wood barrels and salt brine and fermenting agents; and, finally, the refrigeration route. Hunn’s Private Stock, the pickles coming out of the First Place Foods factory, use the latter two methods.

I’m sitting at Twisted Root the best and right way: with my cardboard tray absolutely loaded with every type of Hunn’s family pickle that’s offered. Twisted Root uses Hunn’s fermented-process pickles. You’ll find them in the mini-barrel vats on a table at Twisted — the Atomic pickles, Christmas light-red, sweet dills and bread-and-butters. Hunn’s pickles are about 75 percent of the reason why I eat at Twisted Root. I like to pile way too many bread-and-butters onto a Twisted veggie burger for the crunch and the bite of sugar and maybe an Atomic or two on top of the fried green beans.

The pickles at Bob’s Steak and Chop House, the ones you find hanging on the table when you sit down, are essentially marinated cucumbers, giant, fresh ones that use Hunn’s refrigerated process. These are Hunn’s premium product, the Cadillac of pickles. Hunn’s pickles for Bob’s have a pure saltiness, nearly oceanic, like the artisan stuff you’ll find at most chef-driven burger joints.

That refrigerated process is what I’m witnessing from the second floor of First Place Foods, and, to a lover of pickles — whether they’re near cucumber or under a beef patty — it’s a wonder to behold. Everyone, all of us, should find a way to witness the production, no matter if it’s a massive, automated factory or the steady crafting of farmhands, of our favorite foods. It makes you love what you love even more.

You Need To Know About Pickle Vodka

It’s what your Bloody Mary’s been missing.

Pickle Vodka – BLUE SPIRITS DISTILLING

BY    –  DELISH

It’s definitely been the “summer of the pickle” in the Delish kitchen. All season long, we’ve served up recipes incorporating crunchy dills in every way possible, from pickle pasta saladto bacon pickle fries, and though the process has renewed our love of the zesty snack, we’ll admit to feeling a bit … pickled out. However, we recently came across a pickle product so different and delicious that we just can’t keep it to ourselves. My friends, pickle vodka is here.

Sparked by the popularity of mouth-puckering pickleback shots, one Washington distillery got inspired to create their own spin on the pickle + liquor combo. The experts at Blue Spirits Distilling hand-select pickles at their production facility on Lake Chelan to go into their potent, 120-proof, pickle-flavored vodka.

At Blue Spirits’ tasting room in Leavenworth — a cute, Bavarian-themed town 50 miles away —visitors get to taste the briny concoction, and they’re frequently shocked by how much they love it. Tastings allow visitors to choose three base liquors (the distillery makes other vodka flavors like cucumber and espresso, as well as gin, whisky, tequila and rum), which they sip straight, before the staff makes them creative mini cocktails using the spirits. According to one tester, drinking the liquor is like eating a fresh pickle. It’s smooth and has a salty flavor without being overpowering.

The pickle vodka makes a mean dirty pickle martini — perfect for those who loathe olives but still want to feel like Don Draper — and we have a hunch that it’d be insanely good in a pickle Bloody Mary. The distillery suggests adding a thimble’s amount (1/4 oz.) of the pickle vodka to the top of a cocktail made with unflavored vodka. Don’t forget — this stuff is strong, and a little bit provides more than enough of a fresh, salty kick. “The higher proof has a more enhanced flavor and aroma,” says Heidi Soehren, co-owner of Blue Spirits Distilling. “When applied as a topper to a cocktail, you get a delightful burst of flavor and scent at first taste.”

The pickle flavor shots are definitely a tasting room favorite — the Leavenworth distillery sells up to 600 of the cute, wax-topped 50ml bottles per month for $12.50 a pop. It’s popularity even inspired new concentrated flavors like lemon, almond-orange, ginger and lavender. For now, you’ll have to visit to bring some home — but pickle vodka is making its way around to several distributors in the U.S. and Canada, so expect to see it elsewhere once cocktail connoisseurs across the country catch on to the pickle trend. Until then, quiet your cravings with some pickleback Jell-O shots or gin & tonic pickles.

Introducing a new vodka made with pickles

This is a creative mixture between America’s favorite healthy snack and a favorite type of alcoholic drink.

By  –   Curated by Tiffany Bailey   –   Blasting News

Cocktails, Image Credit: bridgesward / Pixabay

Delish recently reported a new form of vodka that is made with picklesrecently launched by a distillery company. The September 7 article said that this new variety of #Vodka is loved by drinkers who described it “like eating a fresh pickle.”

The company behind the pickle vodka is #Blue Spirits Distilling, a company located in Leavenworth in the state of Washington. Their new vodka concoction is made with pickles taken from their production facility on Lake Chelan, Delish added.

The pickle vodka lets drinkers choose three base liquors that are taken straight and bottoms up, before staff from the company mix some mini cocktails using the same variant.

The food and drink publication described the #Alcoholic Drink as salty “without being overpowering.”

Blue Spirits Distilling

This distillery company offers other flavors of their vodka aside from this favorite snack. According to their official website, they also have the same drink made with cucumbers, grapefruit, pepper, mango, and espresso.

The espresso version has blends of rich espresso coffee, chocolate, and fresh oranges. Meanwhile, the cucumber version contains six pieces of the vegetable in one bottle, the website added. The distillery company also gin, whiskey, tequila, rum and other cocktails.

Each of the pickle vodka 50mL bottles is selling at around $12.50, Delish noted. It said that this particular ingredient inspired other flavors to emerge such as almond-orange, lavender, ginger, and lemon.

The alcoholic drink is available in the United States and Canada market.

With a twist

Blue Spirit’s Distilling’s drink can also be customized depending on the taste preferences of the drinker. The food website suggested adding a small amount of the pickle alcohol with cocktails made with unflavored vodka. This concoction reportedly provides drinkers with a strong yet fresh and salty sensation, perfect for those who can handle this amount.

The company’s co-owner Heidi Soehren told Delish that when the pickle mix is applied to an unflavored cocktail, there is a “more enhanced flavor and aroma.” Moreover, drinkers can get an energetic boost of flavor and aroma as soon as they take the first sip.

Pickles are forms of cucumbers that take their name from being “pickled” in brine, vinegar or any other solution. They undergo a fermentation process for a certain period of time, either by putting the pickled cucumbers inside an acidic mixture or through a process known as “lacto-fermentation.”