We’re excited, to say the yeast…

BY ANDREW BUI   –   Tasting Table

To all the kombucha devotees, craft beer aficionados and pickle juice-hoarding gherkin eaters of the world: A festival celebrating all things fermented is headed to New York City at the end of this month.

To help kick off the Big Apple’s annual Beer Week, NYC’s Brewers Guild is hosting the first ever NYC Fermentation Festival, a “celebration of all things fermented.” The event is uniting fermentation fanatics from all over the city for events such as a homebrewing competition, seminars with various home fermentation tips and an abundance of fizzy drinks to sample, from boozy ciders and beers to more kid-friendly kombuchas. An expo of more than 30 vendors, featuring local businesses like Brooklyn Brewery, Kombrewcha and Mama O’s Kimchi, will also be on hand for you to sample everything the wondrous world of fermented foods has to offer (which is a lot).

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The Fermentation Fest takes place February 25 at the Brooklyn Expo Center, so buy your tickets now at the event’s website.

Helmed by Gary and Libby Leybman, the eatery has been bouncing between farmers markets while a brick-and-mortar location in Walnut Hills is under construction.

 

By MADGE MARIL   –   CityBeat

I didn’t get along with pickles. I didn’t like them; I didn’t trust them. I picked them off my burgers. I created tiny napkin walls between them and my french fries at restaurants. So when I first caught wind of local food fermenter The Pickled Pig, by name alone I chalked it up as edibles I would never experience.

Fortunately, I am an idiot often proven wrong. After one bite of The Pickled Pig’s sour pickle, my world was rocked forevermore. 

The Pickled Pig took me by surprise at the Northside farmers market. When I visited the market on a dreary Wednesday afternoon, one of the owners of The Pickled Pig, Gary Leybman (co-owner with his wife Libby), had set up shop next to rows of vegetables and fresh-baked breads. While Leybman’s brick-and-mortar location in Walnut Hills is under construction, The Pickled Pig thrives on farmers markets, bouncing between Northside, Madeira, Anderson and, of course, Findlay, all year long. 

At a farmers market, it’s usually the best practice to go to the booth where everyone else is going. While I browsed, an older gentleman walked up to The Pickled Pig, announcing, “I need the beets!” 

He meant, of course, The Pickled Pig’s garlic beets. To inspire that amount of passion in a man over beets is admirable, a true feat in a world that doesn’t give proper respect to fermented vegetables. 

Opting to go into business fermenting vegetables might seem like an odd choice, but for Leybman, the journey makes sense. Before he began The Pickled Pig, he was a private chef for more than a decade, working in kitchens as varied as The Celestial, Pho Paris, Daveed’s and at Saint Xavier church cooking for the priests. 

“I wanted my own business, but I didn’t want a restaurant,” he says. 

He learned how to make his most popular product — kimchee — in one of those aforementioned eateries, Daveed’s. An item rarely spotted outside of Korean restaurants or groceries, kimchee is a fermented vegetable side dish, generally involving cabbage. The restaurant had featured kimchee on a rotating menu just long enough for Leybman to learn how to make it. 

“As soon as I was good at it, they took it off the menu!” he says. So he went home and made it for himself, expanding on the flavor profile he learned at work. 

The Pickled Pig’s Napa Kimchee blends ginger, garlic and Korean chili with the classic fermented taste — not too sweet, not too sour. They also offer carrot kimchee and kimchee pickles.

Learning and loving the process behind producing kimchee inspired Leybman to ferment his backyard garden. From that first kimchee has stemmed garlic beets, sauerkraut, curried cauliflower and, yes, lots and lots of pickles.

I hadn’t had a pickle since the age of 5, when I bit into a vinegary one that had been sitting in the back of my parents’ fridge in one of those huge jars. When Leybman passed me one of his sour pickles, I felt my 5-year-old-self yell, “Don’t do it!” But I did it. And thank goodness I did. These pickles are nothing like the ones you buy at a supermarket or those relegated to the side of your plate at a burger restaurant. This sour pickle still had a snap of freshness to it — and a crunch. 

“They say a good pickle should be audible from 10 paces away,” Leybman informed me as I (loudly) finished the pickle. 

Besides being delicious, The Pickled Pig’s ferments are heavy in probiotics. Similar to yogurt, the fermented veggies are full of live bacteria, which popular science agrees aids in digestion. While probiotics occur naturally in the body, introducing them through ferments can help balance your system and reintroduce good bacteria into the gut. Basically, this food is so good that it’s good for you. 

The flavors of Leybman’s past also color the dishes he offers. Leybman immigrated to Cincinnati from Belarus in Eastern Europe as a refugee because the government wouldn’t allow his family to practice Judaism. 

He describes the Jewish people leaving Belarus as an exodus. There were two waves during the collapse of the Soviet Union; Leybman’s family immigrated during the second wave. He went through Austria and Italy, helped along by the kindness of other Jewish families. 

His family’s plan was to immigrate to Philadelphia. But in Italy, none of the Jewish refugees spoke English. 

“We had to file immigration paperwork, and everyone was just copying one another’s answers, right?” he says. “My parents copied down ‘Cincinnati’ instead of ‘Philadelphia’ after reading the English off someone else’s papers. So we came here by mistake.” 

Now, Leybman smiles as he tells his family’s story. “Kind of a large mistake. But it really worked out.

“This,” he says as he places a hand on a jar of the garlic beets, “tastes like home.” 

The Pickled Pig is now Leybman’s full-time job. While he sells his products in farmers markets around Cincinnati, they are also being snatched up by vendors like Jungle Jim’s. When negotiating how much of his fermented vegetables and pickles Leybman should bring to sell through Jungle Jim’s, they told him to “bring it all.” And so he did, and then went back to the kitchen to make some more. 

In pursuit of his dream of opening a brick-and-mortar, Leybman turned to the community he knew and loved and created a Kickstarter in the hopes of funding the storefront. 

Cincinnati replied, loudly: 252 backers pledged more than $15,000. Thanks to the community support, Leybman was able to purchase a space in Walnut Hills, which is slated to open in about a year. 

The space will operate as a storefront and deli, featuring The Pickled Pig products and smoked meats — another hobby of Leybman’s. But if you can’t wait to try The Pickled Pig’s wider menu, they are available for catering — anything from smaller groups to parties of 200.

As The Pickled Pig grows, visit its website to see where it’ll be each week. Chances are, it’s a farmer’s market near you. 

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 For more on THE PICKLED PIG, visit smokedandpickled.com.

Will you relish it or hate it?

BY RHEANNA O’NEIL BELLOMO   –   delish

Pickles are polarizing: While some people pick them as their favorite snack—and they’re one of the most storied of pregnancy cravings—others totally hate them. And then there are the next-level pickle obsessives who swear by boozy pickleback shots. Riding the cult following of the vinegar-soaked cucumber, one man decided to open a restaurant dedicated to the garlicky things.

In New York (of course) the team behind a kosher shop called The Pickle Guys is now working on a full blown, brick-and-mortar sit-down restaurant concept. So far, the menu is still in the works, Eater reports. But the shop’s manager said it’s leaning toward focusing on various types of fried pickles. Because obviously.

But there will also be variations on the pickle in fried form, including fried okra, fried mushroom, and fried tomato. “We pickle many, many things throughout the year,” manager William Soo told Eater. “We’ll try to bring that stuff to the eatery.”

Once it opens—the date is currently slated for sometime in March or April—the restaurant will be set-up for to-go orders, however there will also be limited seating at bar stools and tables.

You can also drink it, use it to brine a chicken or add it to a marinade.

BY CHRISTINE BURNS RUDALEVIGE   –   PORTLAND PRESS HERALD

Pickle brine is not an insignificant substance.

According to Pickle Packers International, Inc., a trade association for the pickled vegetable industry, Americans consume more than 2.5 billion pounds of commercial pickles each year. Even before you start counting the ones we pickle at home, we’re still talking about 20 billion pickles annually, folks.

All of which have been sitting in a brine comprising some combination of water, salt, sugar and spices, a mixture most of us don’t think twice about dumping down the drain. Being resolute about using up used pickle brine across your culinary repertoire is a small, but significant, step to take for a greener new year.

Based on the eight jars of pickles in my cupboard, I estimate a quart jar can hold 10 large, 16 medium or 24 small pickles. Once the pickles, regardless of their size, are gone, each of the jars is left with 1¼ to 1½ cups of what you can now think of as liquid flavor.

You can drink it, especially before and after a tough workout, when it can help relieve muscle cramps (thanks to the sodium and vinegar) and help replenish electrolytes, which renders expensive, plastic-bottled, sugary sports drinks unnecessary. Given that it is the day after New Year’s Eve, I can also offer up pickle brine as a hangover cure.

If you are taking it straight up, sipping is the right approach. A big chug might not sit well in your tummy. You could always strain the brine into Popsicle molds and freeze it if you need to further monitor the speed at which you take it in.

Pickling expert Marissa McClellan, who wrote “Food in Jars,” “Preserving by the Pint” and “Naturally Sweet Food in Jars,” says you can use spent pickle brine to make more pickles – but only if you are making a batch of refrigerator pickles. And we’re not just talking about cucumbers; you can quick-pickle sliced red onions, grated carrots, hard-boiled eggs, garlic, artichoke hearts or any other soft vegetables. McClellan warns that once a brine has been processed in either a water bath or a pressure canner and has sat in a jar on the shelf with a batch of pickles submerged in it, the acidity of the brine will not likely be high enough to make a new batch safe to store unrefrigerated.

Cathy Barrow, whose book “Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry” guides cooks through sundry ways of using every bit of the canned goods in your larder deliciously, suggests using pickle juice to brine chicken. A basic brine – essentially a salt-and-water solution with optional flavorings – tenderizes meat and allows it to absorb the flavored liquid. If you want to cut the sourness, add a little brown sugar. If you want only a hint of pickle, cut the brine with an equal amount of water.

You can use pickle brine anywhere you’d use vinegar, such as salad dressings, marinades and barbecue sauces. You can use it – albeit in shorter measure – in a dirty martini instead of olive juice or to tart up a Bloody Mary, swapping out the celery garnish for a pickle spear, of course. And you can use a dash of pickle juice anywhere a heavy or flat-tasting dish need a bit of zip – like when you’re boiling a pot of potatoes, mixing up meatloaf, baking macaroni and cheese, steaming vegetables or making hummus.

The one Internet-fueled idea I found hard to swallow was using pickle juice to make bread. The recipes I read recommended a 1:1 swap with warm water used in standard bread recipes. I wasn’t thrown off by the potential taste – I thought that would be great – but I worried the acid would diminish the bread’s rise. In fact, it doesn’t. My homemade pretzel dough rose to twice its size in the expected 90 minutes. And the finished product was soft, chewy perfection with a pleasing tang that allowed me to forgo my usual mustard on the side.

Christine Burns Rudalevige is a food writer, a recipe developer and tester and a cooking teacher in Brunswick. Contact her at: cburns1227@gmail.com.

By Tracy Saelinger   –   USA Today

You’re usually in the pickle camp or you’re not. If you’re a true pickle devotee, though, you’re probably on board for pretty much anything pickled: fried pickles, pickle-brined chicken, quick pickles, pickle-juice cocktails. You get the idea.

So when those of us pickle lovers at TODAY Food heard about a dill pickle soup recipe that’s going viral, we decided what we’re having for dinner tonight.

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The recipe is the creation of Cathy Pollak, a food and travel writer, winemaker and wine grower based in McMinnville, the heart of Oregon’s Willamette Valley wine country — not far from Portland, where of course, the city’s love of pickles inspired the “You can pickle that!” sketch on Portlandia.

On her blog, Noble Pig, Pollak posted the original recipe a few years ago­, and it swept the country then. But more recently, she posted a video to Facebook, and it went wild — to the tune of 15 million views and counting.

“It took on a life of its own mostly because people are either in love with the idea (pickle lovers) or they are disgusted with the idea,” Pollack told TODAY Food.

If you, too, have pickle juice running through your veins, you’re probably with the tens of thousands of commenters who have posted things like “I NEED this” or a string of green-emoji hearts. “Seriously people, make it! It’s so much better than it sounds. Don’t forget to get some crusty bread to dip in there!” encourages one poster.

Others are ambivalent — there’s lot of “I’m still not sure how I feel about this” comments — to vehement dissenters: “This makes me want to vomit!” writes a poster, who, full disclosure, once accepted a dare to drink a cup of pickle juice. OK, well, that makes sense.

The recipe itself, which you can find here, is easy: It calls for a dozen ingredients and takes about 30 minutes to make, start to finish.

Note: You will need at least 2 cups of pickle juice (personally, after I’m done with a jar of pickles, I keep the remaining juice in the fridge for situations just like this!). Pollak does mention in the recipe, “All pickle juice is not created equal. Some are saltier than others.” After adding the pickle juice, taste the soup before adding the final seasonings, and adjust accordingly, she suggests.

As pickle lovers, we implore you to give it a try — and report back if you do.