By: Bridget Sharkey

Sioux City Journal 

(Photo by: Delish.com)

Is there anything better than enjoying an icy cold popsicle on a hot summer’s day? How about a homemade popsicle made from pickle juice?

Yes, pickle juice! It might sound a little nuts, but homemade pickle popsicles are majorly trending right now, and for good reason. They are light, flavorful and healthy — in fact, some research has shown that pickle juice can even help to prevent muscle cramps and keep blood sugar levels in check. That explains why so many athletes love the stuff.

Here is the best part about these homemade pickle pops: They are so beyond easy to make! All you need is pickle juice (such as the juice leftover from the half-eaten jar of pickles you have had in your fridge since President Obama was in office … wait, is that just me?!), and granulated sugar. You can find the entire how-to video on Delish.com.

For an even stronger pickle-y flavor, you can also include pickle slices. If you don’t have pickle slices, you can cut whole pickles into thin slices yourself.

If you are concerned about processed sugar, or you want a little less pickle flavor, you might consider this alternative pickle popsicle recipe from Health magazine. It is made with honey, so you can avoid the white sugar that is used in the Delish.com recipe. It also includes a whole cucumber (chopped up, of course) instead of pickles. Although it still does include a cup of pickle juice, so it still packs plenty of pickle-punch!

The best part of making homemade popsicles is how you play around with the ingredients and tailor the recipe to meet your own personal palate — whether you want to try peanut butter pickle popsicles (yes, really!) or you want to go the traditional route!

By Alexander Sinn

Grand Haven Tribune

(photo by: Toasted Pickle )

The Toasted Pickle in Grand Haven

If you flip to the Food Network’s Cooking Channel on Thursday, Aug. 23, you might recognize a popular downtown Grand Haven restaurant.
The Toasted Pickle will be featured on “Seaside Snacks and Shacks.” The show airs at 10 p.m.
“We were quite surprised actually,” owner Karen Avery said of the recognition for her restaurant, which opened at 112 Washington Ave. in downtown Grand Haven two years ago.
Avery said she received an email from the Cooking Channel in early spring, and first thought it might be a scam.

What followed was a competition with 30 restaurants from around the Great Lakes to be featured on a new program, “Seaside Snacks and Shacks.” Four restaurants were selected for the episode.
Toasted Pickle chef Adam Davis, who prepared sandwiches in the episode, said the restaurant puts an emphasis on making food that you would eat with your family.
“We do a different take on traditional sandwiches,” he said. ”We don’t have a walk-in cooler or a freezer here. Everything’s fresh. The only thing we have that’s frozen is french fries and chips.”

Davis showed off two Toasted Pickle sandwiches to show host Sabin Lomac, including the Green Goddess Grilled Cheese, which features a unique homemade pesto sauce. Davis described it as sweeter than most pestos.

The Nashville Hottie — which includes in-house breaded chicken smothered in a sweet, spicy sauce and served on homemade waffles — was also featured.
While a cable television audience may bring new business to the downtown eatery, Avery said she hopes the exposure brings a boost to the entire community.
“It’s just amazing, especially because we’ve only been open a couple years,” she said. “We hope it brings greater awareness to Grand Haven as a whole. It’s a beautiful lakeside community.”

By Korin Miller

Women’s Health 

Photo by: Getty Images Paul Taylor

Pickle Juice helps get rid of muscle cramps

Muscle cramps can make people do some pretty out-there things. Painful foam rolling? No problem! Look like a fool in public attempting to stretch it out? Sure! Drink pickle juice? Um…what?
Yup, this is a thing. Plenty of people—especially runners and football players—claim that drinking pickle juice can help tamp down on painful cramps and even prevent cramps from happening in the first place.

Does it really work?
Let’s back up a second here: Pickle juice is technically brine, which is basically really salty water. The sodium from the salt is where the benefits come from, most people think. Here’s why: When you get dehydrated (like after a hard workout), your body’s electrolytes (which include sodium and potassium) get thrown out of whack, explains Albert Matheny, R.D., certified strength and conditioning specialist, of SoHo Strength Lab and Promix Nutrition. That can cause involuntary muscle contractions, a.k.a. cramps. And according to research, pickle juice may, in fact, help. One small study published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise gave some men who had cramps pickle juice and others water. The researchers found that men who drank the pickle juice had cramps that lasted about 49 seconds less than those who drank water.

Since most people get cramps because of a lack of sodium, pickle juice will “definitely fix this,” says Matheny. “But it’s not much different from drinking some salt water.”
For the record, the types of exercisers who likely need to resort to something like drinking pickle juice are people who are running long distances in hot weather, football players who are working out for hours in pads in the heat, or people who are doing hot yoga, Matheny says.

If that’s you, you can try to have an ounce or two of pickle juice after you work out and see where that gets you, he says. Just chase it with a solid amount of water to make sure you’re staying hydrated, too.

Are there any drawbacks to drinking it?

If you have hypertension, adding a huge salt load to your diet could potentially be an issue (so talk to your doctor first), says Matheny.
Pickle juice could also dehydrate you if it’s the only thing you’re sucking down after a workout. But as long as you drink pickle juice in moderation and follow it with lots of water, you should be fine, he says.
But what if you can’t stomach pickle juice…?
Sports drinks like Gatorade and Powerade work to replace lost sodium and electrolytes in your body, but they don’t have as much of an impact as super-salty pickle juice if you’re doing extreme workouts in the heat, Matheny says. Still, they can help. If pickle juice isn’t your thing, try drinking a sports drink before, during, and after your hard workout and seeing where that gets you, Matheny suggests. You can also try adding a teaspoon of salt to 20 ounces of water and drinking it, he says. (You can add citrus fruit juice to the mix for flavoring.)
“The salt will actually help you absorb the water more efficiently,” Matheny says. Eating normally, i.e. not following a restrictive diet, can also help, he says.

Ultimately, if you’re not working out super-hard and for a long in the heat, you really don’t ~need~ pickle juice to help you out in the cramp department. But if you’ve found that you’ve been experiencing a ton lately, it could be worth a try…provided you can stand the taste.

By:Max Watman

Daily Beast 

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

The new trend is pickle flavor !

 

My wife and I were eating dill pickle-flavored pork rinds, when I broke the news to her that fast-food chain Sonic had just launched a new pickle-flavored slushie.
“I think,” she said sagely, “we’ve reached peak pickle.”
The next morning I was still chuckling to myself about her comment, when I watched Sunny Anderson and Jeff Mauro carve shot glasses out of pickles on the Food Network show, The Kitchen, and fill them with bourbon.

But it wasn’t that long ago when pickle-flavored anything seemed exotic and slightly scandalous.
In 2007, a scrappy little Brooklyn pickle brand called McClure’s was just getting rolling. At the time “we were roughly making 720 jars per day,” remembers Joe McClure, co-founder and COO of the company.

Some of those jars were being stored below the satirically named bar, the Bushwick Country Club. As a courtesy, the watering hole offered patrons plates of sliced pickles. According to lore, bartender Reggie Cunningham and some hell-raising Floridian got over their respective hangovers by chasing a shot of Old Crow Bourbon with a shot of pickle brine. And with that the now ubiquitous Pickle Back was suddenly born.

What strikes me most about the Pickle Back’s history and success is that most people used to squish up their faces at the concept, which only added to its appeal. Pickles? Ewww. Even John Roberts, the owner of the Bushwick Country Club, in an interview he filmed with Brooklyn Magazine, said that he thought the drink sounded disgusting.

 

My, how times have changed.

Utz has rippled chips in a flavor they call “fried dill pickle.” I like the heavy dill aromas, but there’s also a malty sweet ketchup thing going on—perhaps this is meant to be the fried part?—that is less appealing.

Farmhouse Culture makes a snack called a “Kraut Crisp.” This is a chip of sauerkraut and corn, and it comes in dill pickle-flavor. Eating them brings me right back to the whole “here have some carob, it’s just like chocolate” era, when things in health food stores tasted like, well, the health food store.

Turkey Hill Dill Pickle Pork Rinds are the usual around where I live in Virginia, and are very good. And a fistful of Southern Recipe Small Batch Spicy Dill Pork Rinds is what sparked this whole conversation, although, I think the company forgot to put “pickle” on the label, but they certainly taste like they are pickle flavored and they’re solid.
Chips that taste like pickles, however, are really just a natural extension of the classic salt-and-vinegar category. After all, pickle brine is salt and vinegar. Of course, the moment that folks put that together, pickle juice brined pork chops and fried chicken started showing up everywhere. Pickle juice gives a mysterious kick to the no-longer-a-secret sauce at Shake Shack. It is the je ne sais quoi in the delicious Bloody Mary at Mission District institution, Elixir, in San Francisco. At the Lucky Pickle Dumpling Company in Manhattan, they pull a pickle-flavored soft serve ice cream, studded with pickle chips.

Pickle juice, pickles, pickle flavoring: it’s suddenly everywhere and is unescapable.

At Sonic, the pickle juice slushie is, so far, a limited engagement. Scott Uehlein, Sonic’s vice president of product innovation and development, told me that his “culinary team took a deep dive in the Austin area trying different fountain and frozen products at snow cone stands and we saw tigers blood, Bahama mama and then pickle juice.” Interesting, in this context, this is the only pickle thing that I’ve found that leans away from dill pickles, and towards the sweeter bread-and-butter variety.

“Because our slush is sweet to start off with, we knew we had to go with something more sweet and sour to incorporate the flavor,” said Uehlein.
Response had been “extremely positive,” and I’m hoping that the flavor sticks around long enough for me to get another one and bring it home so I can drop in a shot of Jameson Irish Whiskey.
The biggest surprise came out of KFC. I did not expect much from their new “pickle flavored chicken.” One bite into this fried chicken doused in what seems to be a thickened pickle brine, but really, for all I know, was simply a jar of pickle chips tipped over my chicken, led to a hurricane of praise. It is fantastic. (Sadly, I couldn’t get any details about the process, since no one from the chain’s parent company, Yum! Brands, would return my messages.)

What, however, is going on? Why the explosion of pickle flavors? And while I like many of these products, no matter how gimmicky, I still can’t help but wish that people would leave the humble pickle alone. Or, at least, let it be a pickle again.

There is some hope: McClure’s is up to about 10,000 jars of their delicious pickles a day. Joe McClure told me “growing means more of everything: cash, employees, space, travel, and automation. It’s a never-ending ride. Maintaining our supply chain and relationships with our ingredient providers have been key to improved quality. Also, process is important that we’re making the product the same way each time.”

But he thinks we’re not actually at peak pickle with even more pickled-flavored items soon coming to the market. What’s going on? McClure chalks this up to an increasing interest in fermentation and its supposed related health benefits. (I credit this trend to author Sandor Katz and the popularity of his book, The Art of Fermentation.)
For McClure, it sounds like the future might be in the pickle itself. He didn’t say he’d be the one doing it, but he predicted that “we’ll also see pickles being delivered in packages outside of the standard glass jar and more in vehicles like foil snack packs for more convenience. That’s one area the pickle category has lacked: convenience.”
Pickle for pickle’s sake—that will be refreshing. Until we get there, pass me the pickle-flavored chips, fried chicken and slushies.