Archive for January, 2010|Monthly archive page
fox news looks at rick's picks
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Recently, I told the story of Rick’s Picks to Fox News… it will air next Monday, February 1 on their evening news program with Sheppard Smith some time between 7 and 8 PM EST. You can also see it here.
dill flower news in the dead of winter
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A dill flower at its fragrant peak. The wasp appears to agree. That's the wasp in the photo AND the wasp writing this caption.
Most people see dill flowers and think of snowflakes. For me, it’s the other way around. But hey, I am a pickle guy, right? There’s some exciting dill flower news developing up near Utica. Luke George, who grows the beans Upstate we use for Mean Beans and Windy City Wasabeans just called to say he is going to have a significant amount of greenhouse space free up around Memorial Day. So we are talking about growing a gigantic amount of dill flowers in the greenhouse for all the pickles that need dill. Getting the peak moment of dill flowers and fresh produce to line up is not something that nature allows to happen as often as we would like, so Luke’s greenhouse plan is a great development for Rick’s Picks. Stay tuned.
quite possibly the shortest post on the internet
I believe I have found an interesting new use for Sriracha. Stay tuned.
Sriracha means business any way you serve it.
my other favorite way to enjoy beets
The essential raw ingredients for making Phat Beets.
Over the years, Phat Beets have been one of our most consistently popular pickled items. They have a great balance of sweet and savory, they have a festive color, and they are extremely versatile. Our signature hors d’oeuvre is the Phat Beet Happy Appy, which is a year-round winner made by spreading soft goat cheese on a crostini, laying a slice of Phat Beet on top, and then crowning the creation with blueberries when available. We particularly like it at our annual 4th of July party in Vermont, where its red, white and blue aspect makes it highly thematic.
The Phat Beet Happy Appy.
But my relationship with beets runs much deeper than Phat Beets. I was obsessed with soups long before I became a pickle guy, and one of my all-time favorites is borscht. The best recipe for borscht I know comes from James Peterson’s cookbook Splendid Soups, and my copy has more than its fair share of beet stains and others as well. The recipe is at home, so I will add it later to this post, but the thing I wanted to discuss is how to handle the beets initially. If you rub them with olive oil, and the wrap them with some fresh rosemary in aluminum foil and roast them in a 400-degree oven, they will bring a sublime roasty flavor to the final soup.
Beets prepped for roasting, to be used to sublime effect for borscht.
The recipe in the Peterson cookbook is quite long, and I found a version of it on the web that you can see here. My modifications were to reduce the amount of brisket used to one-third (it is still plenty) and to eliminate the pork shoulder (the flavor is largely masked by everything else going on). It is a hearty delight, superb with a dollop of sour cream and some sprinkles of fresh dill. If you are having a crowd over for the Super Bowl, it is a great one-pot offering.
bartender, i'll have a pickleback with my whiskey, thank you
My friend Gianfranco of Louis 649 has proven himself to be an effective prognosticator in the recent past. He predicted that an event hosted by him and featuring me telling the story of Rick’s Picks would be a sellout on a recent rainy January Tuesday (he turned away 20 people, it was so crowded). Now he’s on record with the notion that in 6 months all the top bars in town will be offering Picklebacks. He’s got a lot of friends in the close-knit circle of downtown mixologists and Picklebacks are all the rage. To answer your next question, a Pickleback is a shot of pickle juice used to chase a shot of whiskey.
A Pickleback made with brine from The People's Pickle. The amber lighting is appropriate, given the beverages one consumes with Picklebacks.
I’m normally a vodka kind of guy, but I have to say that the combo really is all that. My only issue is deciding whether I like the Pickleback to be set up by Maker’s Mark or Knob Creek. I guess more research is required.
why I love winter
I’m in a partially-blacked out hotel in a very rainy San Francisco on a Tuesday morning in the middle of January. It’s a perfect moment to reflect on why I love winter. I’m here for the Winter Fancy Food Show, where one can meet all sorts of interesting food people from Switzerland to Iowa. And I have.
But what really captivates me about winter in general is it is a time for my business to make new plans, so test recipes for new pickles we will roll out at the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York. New retail items that pick up on the success of The People’s Pickle, new bulk items for restaurants… it is going to be a great year. Our site will continue to grow and blossom too… we’ll have tons of ideas and lots of new merchandise on the site as we become the wikipedia of all things pickled. More to come!
life is salty enough
I’ve never understood why people feel the need to add so much salt to their dishes. Life is salty enough. Just by being an eater on Planet Earth, you can encounter enough salt to fulfill most of your needs and desires. Certainly, salt does enhance flavors, but so do lots of other things. I’m a big proponent of citrus notes in lieu of salt. A squeeze of lemon juice will brighten the flavor of countless dishes. It provides a tart note to our Phat Beets, for example.
The health benefits of a low sodium approach to eating are well documented. Many of us struggle to control blood pressure, and reducing salt intake is a key aspect of that issue. Last year we introduced our first pickle that clearly proclaimed it was a low sodium product, The People’s Pickle.
who needs salt when you have garlic, dill and coriander?
Folks had been clamoring for us to do a deli-style garlic pickle for years. Having it be a low sodium pickle to boot is a huge bonus: with only 70 mg of salt per serving, it comes in at half the salt level (140 mg) which the FDA defines as “low sodium”. Many people think they can’t enjoy pickles due to the quantity of salt they contain. Rick’s Picks offers a wide array of low sodium products, ten in all.
Hey, I use sea salts in cooking and they are great. My position is not intrangible on this topic. I just think that if we kept the idea that life is salty enough in our heads when making food choices, we would open ourselves to a wider world of tasty and healthier possibilities.
a chat with the village voice
Filed under: business of pickling, media, pickle making observations, recipe ideas |
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After my talk at Louis 649 the other evening, I got an email from Jenny Miller, a writer who contributes to the Village Voice’s Fork In The Road column. We had a nice conversation about all things pickled, which you can read here.
cuban sandwiches, supersized and super-delicious
I will freely admit there is little I enjoy more than sitting around with friends watching football. The “hang” is always embellished with detailed food preparations… no take out pizza for my guys. And you should see what we come up with when we go on the road and tailgate!
my bros and I tailgating.
This weekend, with everyone scheduled to come over for a more sedate afternoon of viewing from the couch, I made, among other things, Cuban sandwiches. The Cuban is composed of a relatively few number of ingredients, carefully prepared and combined. We started by slow-roasting a pork shoulder, in chicken stock with some stewed tomatoes and herbs. 10 hours later, the meat was ultra-tender and, as they say, falling off the bone (I’ll have to update this post later with the picture I took of the pork with another camera). We got two kinds of bread, soft rolls for those who prefer that style, and ciabatta for those who like it chewy and firm (that would be me). First, we sliced off the very top of each loaf, to open up the “pores” on top of each piece of bread and then sliced each loaf lengthwise in half. Then it’s time to pile on: a generous spread of mustard, thin-sliced country ham, Swiss cheese, copious slices of The People’s Pickle (which I pre-sliced in half to make the sandwich more compact) and of course, a lucious layer of the delicious, ropy pork.
"piling on" is a positive in both cuban sandwich preparation and in football.
More cheese on top of the pork is a good idea… isn’t everything better with more cheese? The whole kit and kaboodle then gets pressed in a sandwich press (I use the Krups model… an indispensible bargain at $75). Voila!
one things these sandwiches generally come with is an after-the-fact nap.
An innovation this time involved the cooking liquid from the pork shoulder, which we reserved and blended smooth. It made a sublime dipping sauce. The only problem with the adventure was that our team got its butt kicked, in a playoff game no less. Cuban sandwiches will provide comfort always, football teams sometimes.
The Case Of The Half-Stolen Market Seat
Doing Greenmarkets as we have for all these years, you acquire certain items which make the long days outdoors more efficient, more comfortable, more… better. One of these for me is my trusty market seat. It’s actually an architect’s stool… solid metal construction, excellent swiveling action, made personal with Rick’s Picks pickle jar stickers plastered all over the seat. It’s just a stool, OK, but we’ve worked together for a long time, me and that stool. Well, what do you know, some genius had the gumption to steal just the seat part the other day when we were loading in from the market. What they could possibly to with just a stool seat, I have no idea. Maybe there’s some hitherto unknown stool swap site. In any case, the effect on my long-loved chum was very similar to what befell Marie Antoinette all those centuries ago.
My trusty chum has been beheaded.
I’m hanging on base in the hopes that whoever nefariously absconded with my seat will think better of it and return it to its rightful place. Any information leading to the recovery of the seat will earn the provider a Rick’s Picks Top-Seller Pack. No questions asked, except maybe… WHY?
