Secret Ingredient
While I’m a farmer, I’m also a businessperson so it’s in my best interest to pay attention to the latest food trends. Recently I began seeing content about the hot new thing for flavoring cooking and you probably have it in your refrigerator right now. I fell for the hook and clicked to see if I, indeed, had it in my fridge.
Like bell bottoms, leg warmers and mutton chops (on men), styles and fashions make the rounds over time. As I suspected, the writer looked fresh out of school with nary enough experience to know pickle juice has always been the Swiss Army knife of kitchen condiments.
The article went on about pickle juice bringing umami to vegan cooking and I bet myself they probably didn’t know that pickle juice makes a great tenderizer and marinade for meat, too. Soak a steak or pork chop with what’s left in a pint tub of Maple Bourbon after the pickles have been polished off. You’ll thank me.
This got me thinking about all the things over the years I’ve done with pickle juice.
As a college student, I ate a lot of egg salad sandwiches. Eggs were a cheap protein. At the grocery store where I worked, the bread deliveryman would leave his out-of-date loaves for the employees. Running lean on mayo and out of pickles, I mixed in the pickle juice as a last ditch effort to give my lunch a smoother consistency and better taste. To this day, I still add pickle juice to my egg salad and to tuna salad, too.
It's not only run-of-the-mill commercial pickle juice that works. Artisan and ethnic pickles are truly a game changer. Want to take steamed vegetables to a new level? Toss them with the dregs of kimchi. The hotter, the better.
The brine and spices are the work horses of this magic elixir. However, sweet pickle juice has sugar which creates a syrupy glaze. Use it with potatoes, with fish, with anything that takes a shot to a hot pan at the last moment of cooking.
Forget putting pickles on your burgers and instead put the juice in your burgers, especially when the pickles had lots of garlic. All the herbs and spices instantly perk up a plain patty.
Got company and need a quick dip? Pickle juice and sour cream or cream cheese mixed together is as easy as it gets working well with everything from pita to crudites.
It’s not only cooks in the kitchen using pickle juice; it’s long been used in savvy bartenders’ arsenals. There’s a jar of pickled ramps in my refrigerator right now waiting for the first hot day of spring when I’ll sip on a ramp-tini after a long Sunday made with some of that great local gin one finds at the market. Pickle juice, tomato juice and shot of hot sauce is a stand-in for Bloody Mary mix, too.
These are all ideas for what can be done with pickle juice as an ingredient, but there’s even more. You can put stuff in the pickle juice such as hard boiled eggs and vegetables. For vegetables, I like to bring the pickle juice to a boil along with the vegetables to kill off any unwanted molds or bacteria that may be lurking on the raw ingredients. Let it all cool and put it back in the fridge.
There’s a zillion types of pickles out there, including the delicious ones you find at the farmers market, giving a variety of flavors for you to use in your next meal or cocktail. There’s no secret to it, only innovation.