by Amy Brocato Pearson   –   Brookshire’s

French’s has outdone themselves.

First, they were practically the Official Food of Thanksgiving. Now, they’ve turned up the heat.

Literally.

From the French fried onions that have graced the top of green bean casseroles all over America, French’s has now created the Crispy Jalapeño. Let me just tell you, you can eat them right out of the can.

French’s started with freshly picked jalapeños, sliced them and fried them in their secret batter, turning out a crispy, zesty snack full of heat and spice.

These gems are perfect on top of enchiladas or tacos, sprinkled on a taco salad or soup, baked into corn bread, and served on top of queso or spreadable dips. They’re perfect atop a burger or chicken sandwich, on grilled cheese or on top of hot dogs. The options are endless.

– See more at: http://www.brookshires.com/2017/02/20/blog-product-talk-frenchs-crispy-jalapenos/#sthash.IBZ9Wsxu.dpuf

Pickle juice enthusiasts enjoy beverage for taste, health benefits.

• By BOB HANSEN for The Hawk Eye

Pass up that sugary Slurpee and don’t spend money on over-priced energy drinks because there’s a new taste concoction in Burlington. It’s semi-frozen pickle juice — the slushy taste adventure created from the briny liquid left in the bottom of the jar when the last gherkin has been grabbed.

Presently, pickle proponents can purchase the slushy mix only at a local roller skating facility and the concession stand at Notre Dame High School basketball games. However, pickle promoters hope it might find wider acceptance.

The pickle pops first flowered at the local basketball games when a group of concessionaire volunteers noted the pickled cucumbers were enjoying a steady demand from young customers. But after the large gallon jars had been emptied, there still was a considerable amount of salty and vinegary liquid left behind.

The parsimonious pickle pushers were reluctant to dump the brine and began to explore freezing it for sale. Immediately, the experimenters learned the high salt content prevented the mix from becoming solid and a true pickle pop could not be offered. The best they could achieve was a semi-frozen soup.

Nevertheless, the volunteers persisted and offered the slush in individual plastic serving cups. Soon, students and fans were watching the basketball action with their noses buried in small white cups

Karen Marino, who helps out at the Notre Dame concession counter, reported the juice has been offered for sale for at least two years. “I’m not really a pickle person,” she explained, “so I don’t understand the attraction. But they seem to be what the kids want.

“They are so popular that we tried another variation; using cherry juice that we had left over but that is not nearly as good a seller. But pickle pops do well, and we make about $11 out of every jar of liquid that we used to throw out.”

Coulter Fruehling, a student at Notre Dame who often purchases a pickle cup when he attends his school’s ballgames, said the attraction is the strong salt taste.

“You pick up some of the pickle taste but it is mainly the salt that I like and I have a lot of friends that buy it for the same reason,” he said.

At Kenny’s Roller Ranch, owner Tim Barraclough considers the Notre Dame pickle purveyors a pack of late-comers, for he claims he has been offering cups of frozen brine since 2001, when his daughter in North Carolina told him of the treats popularity in that state.

“It has been a regular here for a long time but we don’t make it out of any type of pickle juice. We go for the kosher dill because of the strong garlic taste,” Barraclough said.

Unfrozen pickle juice long has been recognized for its restorative qualities by high endurance athletes. Athletes often will quaff about one-third of a cup for an almost instantaneous relief of muscle cramps. The salt restores an electrolyte balance while the vinegar stops nerve signals from cramped muscles.

Burlington’s George VanHagen, physical therapist assistant at Great River Medical Center, also can attest to the competitive advantages gained from drinking pickle juice. In November, he attended the USA Cycling Summit in Colorado Springs and the brine was the subject for discussion.

Jennifer O’Donnell-Giles told the athletes and medical professionals attending the conference pickle juice has been the rage in the race circuit for the last few seasons. She cited a study at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, that found the juice has a positive impact on the body’s electrolytes and prevents muscle cramps.

But regardless of the causation, athletes are turning to pickle juice as part of their pre-race preparation.

There also are arguments regular shots of pickle juice can have long-term health benefits. It can act as a shield against the dreaded free radicals, promote weight loss and aid the digestive system. A less beneficial — yet enjoyable quality — is it makes a great “dirty martini” when mixed with vodka.

The miracle of pickle juice plays out even in the kitchen, where it is used for cleaning the bottom of copper pots.

It appears there is little pickle juice cannot do, so the skaters and basketball fans downing the ice mix may be on the cutting edge of the next great trend in health drinks.

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.