by Frances Marion Platt   –   HV1

Kathleen Perry of Rosendale’s Perry’s Pickles at Picklefest 2013. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

It may seem hard to believe, if you haven’t actually been the one doing all the work, that the Rosendale International Pickle Festival has been around for two decades now. It was founded by local garden center proprietor (and now town historian) Bill Brooks, his wife Cathy and their friend Eri Yamaguchi, who missed the traditional tsukemono of her homeland. What started out as a Japanese dinner party for 200 soon turned into a celebration of all things pickled that attracted about 1,000 people the first year, and by now, 5,000 or more annually. From the beginning, it has also been a fundraiser that benefits several different community projects in and around Rosendale each year.

The Pickle Festival returns to the Rosendale Recreation Center this Sunday, November 19 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A highlight is always the county-fair-style competition for home-fermented concoctions, but it’s also a fun gathering for those more interested in tasting pickle products than in creating them. Of the 100 vendors setting up shop both inside the Rec Center and in and around the large tent outside, about a quarter will actually be selling pickled foods of myriad descriptions, including the legendary deep-fried pickles-on-a-stick. Other prepared foods to round out your meal, in addition to crafts and packaged gourmet products, will also be available for sale.

Repeat visitors know to expect live music and dancing from many ethnic traditions — as diverse as there are types of pickled foods around the world — for most of the day. Late in the afternoon, the Pickle Triathlon gets underway. It starts with a Pickle-Eating Contest, in which contestants vie to consume the entire contents of a small jar of Mount Olive Pickle Spears in the shortest period of time. Next comes a Pickle-Juice-Drinking Contest, where contestants are tasked with downing 24 ounces of brine through a straw. The final event, the Pickle-Tossing Contest, is a team effort: The pitcher tosses a pickle chip to the catcher, who must catch it in his or her mouth, then spurt it into the counter’s jar. Gold, Silver and Bronze awards are conferred upon the top three winners in each category.

The Brookses have been trying to retire gradually from their management of this event for about three years now, with the Rosendale Chamber of Commerce now the official Festival sponsor. But they’re still the ones to contact if you want to enter some of your own specialties into competition. Eligible categories in the Home Pickling Contest include Kimchi, Dill Pickles, Sweet Pickles, Pickled Onions/Garlic, Dilly Beans, Pickled Fruit, Pickled Beets, Pickled Veggies, Pickled Brussels Sprouts, Chutneys, Fermented Liquid or Semi-Liquid Products and

Miscellaneous. A Best of Show ribbon will also be awarded.

Competitors are limited to up to three submissions in any combination of categories, and are asked to submit two jars of the same item for each entry (one for display, one for the judges to sample). Each jar should be labeled with the nature of the contents plus the entrant’s name, address, phone number (including area code) and e-mail address. You can drop them off at the Rec Center by 11 a.m. on the day of the Festival (judging begins at noon), or arrange an appointment to drop them off earlier in the week by e-mailing picklelady16@yahoo.com.

Admission to the 20th annual Rosendale International Pickle Festival costs $5 per adult; kids get in free. Pets are not permitted on-site, and the event goes on rain or shine. The Rosendale Community Center is located at 1055 Route 32, just south of its intersection with Route 213. To find out more, visit http://rosendalechamber.org/pickle-festival or www.facebook.com/events/1056620817803091.

BY IMOGEN PULLAN   –   The Japan Times

Ole G. Mouritsen is interviewed at the Royal Society in London on Oct. 17. Mouritsen and chef Klavs Styrbaek cover the history, science and aesthetics of Japanese pickles in a new book. | KYODO

LONDON – A prominent Danish gastrophysicist has made a bold claim: He believes he can get children to not only eat broccoli but enjoy it too.

Having spent the last decade researching and writing on Japanese cuisine, professor Ole G. Mouritsen has turned his attention to tsukemono (Japanese pickles), and believes they are the key to getting children (and some adults) to embrace vegetables.

Tsukemono — vegetables, fruit or flowers that have been preserved in a pickling ingredient such as soy sauce, sake or vinegar — are a mainstay of the traditional Japanese meal. There are believed to be around 4,000 varieties in Japan.

Japan has one of the lowest obesity rates in the world. Mouritsen emphasizes that while tsukemono is neither the sole reason for this nor the sole answer to obesity issues in countries like the United States or Britain, “it is one of the suggestions from Japanese cuisine to make vegetables more interesting and more accessible.”

“I always get scolded when I say this, but there’s a reason why people have problems eating vegetables and that is because they’re not tasty enough,” said Mouritsen, a physicist who works on the science of gastronomy and cooking, a field known as gastrophysics.

At a recent event hosted by the Japan Foundation in London, Mouritsen talked about the science and history of tsukemono.

According to Mouritsen, pickling infuses vegetables with umami (a savory taste) and creates mouthfeel, both of which are generally accepted to be essential to the enjoyment of food.

An added bonus is that some preservatives like shio kōji — a seasoning made from salt and rice treated with mold spores — convert carbohydrates into sugar, making the vegetables sweeter, less bitter and much more acceptable to younger palates.

Individual vegetable consumption thus increases, making people’s diets healthier, Mouritsen suggests.

Mouritsen was first introduced to Japanese food by a colleague when living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a visiting professor in the early 1980s. He was immediately captivated, and he has since visited Japan many times for research.

“What really intrigued me was eating at a counter. You can see the craft and the skills; there’s a deep respect for the raw ingredients and an understanding of flavor,” he said. “What a sushi chef would do, (present a piece of sushi) in his hand, put it in front of you — I think this is something very fundamental within human food culture.”

This interest has led him to write books on sushi, seaweed, umami and mouthfeel, and he was appointed a “goodwill ambassador” of Japanese cuisine by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in 2016.

A keen cook himself, Mouritsen says: “I never use a recipe. What I enjoy about cooking is that if you know a few basic things you can always make something that is delicious and is a good dish.”

His top tip for making tsukemono is to dry the vegetables destined for pickling until they look tired and boring. They will then absorb water and flavor during the marinating process, resulting in a delicious, crunchy taste.

“You just take whatever vegetables you like and cut them in small pieces — broccoli, radish, cabbage — put them in a plastic bag, add a teaspoon of shio kōji, shake it, put it in the fridge, and then just after an hour it’s already changed,” he said. “Sometimes you may want to keep it there for the next day or two days later, and it gets more and more flavorful.”

Mouritsen’s latest book, co-authored with chef Klavs Styrbaek, is about the science and history of tsukemono, as well as its aesthetics and production techniques. The book, titled “Tsukemono,” is currently only available in Danish but is being translated into English for release at a later date.

by Marjorie Korn   –   Men’s Journal

Image via Getty

Ask any endurance athlete his beef with sports nutrition products and he’ll tell you they tend to be sickly sweet. Citrusy drinks, chocolate goo, and fruity beans are tolerable for the first dozen miles but can turn revolting in the final stretch—just when you need energy to power through the finish line.

For your next race or intense training session, try an ancient fueling method: pickles. Legend has it that Julius Caesar fed them to his troops for increased strength and determination, and modern medicine affirms that pickles’ sodium acts to replenish the electrolytes lost through sweat during vigorous exercise, says Sarah Koszyk, R.D.N., a Sand Francisco-based sports nutritionist and distance runner.

Pickle juice, studies have shown, can also prevent muscle cramping. “The acidity of the vinegar cues the brain to tell the muscles to stop contracting and relax,” Koszyk explains. Mustard may have the same anti-cramping effect, she adds. While that puts a Chicago-style dog this close to race fuel, we don’t recommend it.

By Gerald Lauzon, Cornwall Standard-Freeholder

Chile peppers, to spice up Wordwise a bit. Postmedia Network

From early contact in Central America between Spanish explorers and Aztec folk, local spicy peppers — primarily the jalapeño type — were noted as “chiles” (pronounced “chill-ays”).

Other similar fruits were also tagged as “chiles” — a term which had the indigenous sense “hot-to-the-taste.” Later, hot peppers were more specifically named for the terrains where they mostly grew as in these examples: jalapeños from Xalapa, poblanos from Puebla, serranos from a Sierra Mountain region. Spanish and Portuguese explorers then took chile plants and seeds to see if they would grow in their home countries and in trade-affiliated Asian countries near and around the South China Sea (India, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and China). Most chile pepper varieties thrived in the new tropical environments.

Before and during the 1900s in the U.S. and Mexico, “chile” was the usual written form for a hot pepper while “chili” referred to a hot-pepper sauce to which beans were commonly added, With meat also mixed in, the dish was called chili con carne: “chili” for the sauce and bean combination, “con” for “with,” and “carne” for “meat” (linked to “carnivore”). As appreciation of one or another type of piquant chile and chili concoctions increased around the world, there evolved in the U.K. and Europe the spelling variation “chilli.” Today, all three forms are practically interchangeable for such products.

Let’s now consider the South American country called Chile. Its name is not related to the hot pepper source. This word, pronounced “chee-lay,” is from a different indigenous language (Mapuche) with the meaning “edge of the land” as appropriate to the country’s being mostly a narrow 4,000km long coastal area bordered to the west by the Pacific Ocean and to the east by the Andes Mountain Range, and between Peru to the north and the ocean-bordered southern tip of the continent.
The word pepper, as originally denoting the piquant table seasoning shaken or ground over a plate of food, is derived from the Latin term for small berries from a plant called “piper” (pronounced like “pee-pair”). When explorer Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean area, he was introduced to jalapeños, the taste of which reminded him of the sharpness of the food-enhancing cracked-open small “piper” berries as used in Spain. His taste association thus led to the fleshy-walled, tube-like fruit also being called “piper” with similar application to the English equivalent “pepper.”

As such zesty peppers from America gained popularity in Spanish cuisine, some prominent person with a knowledge of Latin (common among nobility of the 1600-1700s) who, being quite taken by the various colorful hues of the fruits from deep green to bright red and glowing shades in between, may have remarked, “Quales pigmenta bella!” (What pretty colors!). Thus, a common aspect of “piper” and “pigmenta” likely meshed to yield Spanish descriptives for a chile pepper as “pimento” and “pimiento.”

Why people come from miles around to sample these mysterious barrel-aged cucumbers

by Sarah B. Hood   –   TVO.org

Barrel-aged pickles like these are available at Young’s General Store only from May through October. (tibungla/iStock)

Should you be heading north of Lake Superior on the Trans-Canada Highway, be warned — you’re in range of Ontario’s most popular locally made dill pickles, available only from May through October, when Young’s General Store, in Wawa, is open for business.

A fixture popular among locals and passersby alike for 46 years now, Young’s resembles a fur trade-era provisioner, with its wide wooden front porch and folksy accoutrements. It’s run by Anita Young and her son Allan Young, who go out of their way to demonstrate their local pride.

“We’re always on a search for Canadian products,” says Anita. “There’s a local blueberry farm here, and we sell all their local products: jam, barbeque sauce, syrup and blueberry horseradish — it’s amazing.”

Young’s also carries a traditional summer sausage made under the store’s own label, as well as a line of old-fashioned fudge the Youngs make in-house. “There’s antiques everywhere in the store, hanging from the ceiling; there’s counters and things in the store that go back, way back. We have a stuffed moose on our porch,” she says. (It’s named Henrietta.)

They even display the original Wawa Goose, an enormous statue installed in 1960 when the Trans-Canada was completed. The first iteration of the oversized avian — intended to draw attention to a town whose Ojibway name can be translated as “wild goose” or “land of the big goose” —was replaced after a few years, but it still stands with its wings spread wide outside Young’s.

Of all the store’s attractions, though, nothing generates more enthusiasm than the dill pickles. For more than four decades, Young’s has been offering a wooden barrel full of tangy, garlicky green torpedoes swimming in a pucker-worthy all-vinegar bath. The pickles come in all sizes, up to almost full-cucumber proportions, and in shades ranging from yellow to dark green. Visitors love to choose their own and fish them out with tongs, to be weighed out at the counter.

The Youngs don’t make their delicious dills in-house; in fact, they’re secretive about the supplier, except to say they’ve been using the same one for 40 years. “I have been told that people have looked for pickles like this and can’t find them in a jar,” Anita says — and in any case, “I couldn’t keep up with sales if we did them here.”

Anita confesses she’s “not a big pickle fan” herself but notes that she was often at pains to keep her son and business partner Allan from drinking the juice when he was young. While customers may not jones for the juice like Allan does, they’re clearly pro-pickle. Locals and out-of-towners often make special trips to Young’s just to get their hands on some — one aficionado drove five hours from Thunder Bay to satisfy a craving.

“We go through a pile of pickles. We have to fill the barrel two and sometimes three times a day if we’re busy,” Anita says. “People from out of town, if they know someone who’s coming from Wawa, they give them a container and get them to pick some up. We have plastic gallon jars here for people who want more or they don’t have their own containers. We have had pickles go on the bus — I’ve sent two jars so far to Topeka, Kansas. They seem to end up almost everywhere.”

The pickles’ popularity is such that Young’s now offers a collection of pickle-related paraphernalia, including pickle suckers, pickle gum, and, of course, pickle chips. And for consummate fans, there’s a T-shirt that says — what else? — “I got pickled at Young’s General Store.”

Sarah B. Hood is a freelance writer and the author of We Sure Can!: How Jams and Pickles Are Reviving the Lure and Lore of Local Food.