Photographs by Kristin Teig

The craft food revival is not just happening in hipster Brooklyn. Boston’s got it going on, too, only ours is a little low-key—and without the attitude.

If you could pick a paragon of a popular provisions-preserving process, it would be the pickle. Added to a sandwich or charcuterie plate, the pickle adds value, and kicks-up flavor. The chefs and food artisans I spoke to love to pickle—it’s creative, easy, and, considering the ingredients, delivers a relatively high ROI. You wouldn’t believe what gets pickled in those tiny restaurant kitchens—and I’m not just talkin’ cucumbers.

Pickling Through Time

Well, OK, you could point to the fact that as far back as 1659 Dutch farmers were growing pickling cucumbers all over Brooklyn. But you could also say eating pickles and other pickled foods became popular way before that. Millennia ago, pickling was used as a way to preserve foods so they could survive long journeys, especially sea voyages. Pickling was still popular in Aristotle’s time—he is said to have praised the healing effects of “cured” cucumbers. Even Cleopatra ate pickles and attributed her good looks to a steady diet of them. Early in the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte, always in search of shelf-stable foods for his troops, deemed pickles a health asset. And in 2000, the brine-washed Philadelphia Eagles beat the favored Dallas Cowboys in Texas, in 109° heat, attributing their victory to a cocktail of water and pickle juice the players drank the day before and all during that game. Fit that in your skinny hemp jeans, Brooklyn!

See the Pickle on Your Plate

How many of those limp, yellow pickle discs have you found on the side of your plate at a restaurant, only to leave them to be tossed away? You won’t do that at Four Burgers. Owner and pickle maker, Michael Bissanti, experiments with pickle recipes in his tiny, busy Mass Ave. kitchen in Cambridge. I believe this intense, 40-something when he says, “If you’re gonna have a great burger you gotta have a great pickle to go along with it.” Bissanti tried commercial sources but couldn’t find one with the clean taste and crunch he was after. So like many creative chefs, he developed his own recipe, inspired by his Italian family who preserved foods as a regular practice when he was growing up. He experimented with recipes for a few days (“I made a lot of bad pickles”), and found it was not as hard as he thought. Four Burgers now has a first cousin called The Brine Lab, which isn’t a lab at all but rather Four Burgers’ standing-room-only kitchen where he and 28-year-old prep guy Derek McCluskey slice and dice veggies into a huge tub of vinegar, salt, and seasonings. After 24 hours you’ve got a Brine Lab pickle. The pickles are crisp, taste fresh and keep their color (try the carrots!). The cucumber pickles are green on the outside and white on the inside—like a, um, cucumber. The Brine Lab pickles are sold at Four Burgers and at retail outlets.

I walked into EVOO the other day for lunch. It was a glorious and breezy spring afternoon in Kendall Square. Customers were sitting outside at tables along Broad Canal Way off Third Street, just a short walk from the new Canal Park area along the Charles. The host seated me near the open kitchen and a gorgeous display of shiny quart jars of pickles—cucumbers, yes, but also crunchy white cauliflower, dangerously red jalapenos, and colorful mixed peppers.  I asked the wait staff if the jars were for sale and he offered to find sous chef Randy Platt, who could answer my questions.  Randy has been pickling at EVOO since 1998.  He does it to preserve the local produce they buy in season. The pickled vegetables are used to add acidity to a dish, and interest to a plate. He pickles asparagus, green tomatoes, cauliflower, sweet and fiery hot peppers, and even cucumbers. He says he may top a parsnip soup with jalapenos, or accompany rabbit liver mousse with sweet pickles.  The amount of product coming out of that kitchen is impressive. There must have been about 12 linear feet of double shelves, holding full quart jars of pickled vegetables, maybe 3 jars deep. Randy graciously let me try both the pickled cauliflower, a favorite vegetable of mine, and the sweet cucumber slices. Both were good enough to make a meal out of. Sweet and tart at the same time, crunchy, the seasonings stopped just short of overpowering the fresh vegetable flavors. His process is the simple salt/vinegar/water bath process, adding various spices (turmeric with the cauliflower) to complement the vegetable.

At The Gallows, in the South End, the title “House Made Pickles,” tops the dinner menu. General Manager Seth Yaffe says that pickles have peppered their line-up since the restaurant’s opening three years ago. The Gallows’ chef, Seth Morrison, a “pickling master,” some say “fanatic,” brought his passion for pickling from his former job at the East Coast Grill in Cambridge.  Morrison, too, uses seasonal, fresh vegetables, most of which are locally sourced from Buckle Farm in Dighton, Massachusetts. In the spring Morrison may pickle fennel, ramps, sun chokes, or parsnips. Even more remarkable is that with each vegetable’s flavor profile in mind, he concocts a vegetable-specific brine.  For example, he makes a ginger-seasoned brine for carrots, a Madras curry-seasoned brine for cauliflower. And he uses a variety of vinegars—white vinegar, red wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, or even Champagne vinegar. When it’s in season, he pickles lamb’s tongue, and when he can get fresh herring, you guessed it, he pickles that, too.

“And in the Pickle Category, the winner is…. Central Bottle Wine + Provisions!” Woohoo! Central Bottle won the 2013 Good Food Award for its pickled garlic scapes. Accepting the award at the iconic Ferry Building in San Francisco is Stacey Daley, Chef/Manager of Central Bottle, creator of the winning product, and Maureen Rubino, Central Bottle’s owner. Extending congratulations and giant bear hugs to them is the doyenne of the food world, Alice Waters. Stacey is deservedly proud of the nationally-competitive award, a food prize which is given annually to outstanding food-artisans in multiple categories. She sources the garlic scapes from a variety of local farms, including Plato’s Harvest, Atlas, and Golden Rule. Stacey says she’s “a pretty simple pickler,” using what’s in season, herbs that have gone to seed, vinegar, salt, sugar.  An organic farmer herself, Stacey appreciates good produce and good relationships with farmers.  She has led the preserving program at Central Bottle for three years. The pickled products are served in the shop to accompany menu items, and are sold in jars.

“It’s kind of a hipster thing,” says Rembs Layman, Executive Chef at Tupelo in Cambridge. He’s talking about pickles, too. Tupelo’s menu is “comfort food with a Southern drawl.” Pickles are traditional in southern cooking which is popular now. You can find Rembs salting and icing and straining hot liquids over a variety of vegetables in the restaurant’s small kitchen. He serves the house pickle plate with main courses like ribs. “The flavor profiles are endless,” he says. “Pickling is a great way to experiment and add a lot of texture and visual appeal to a plate.” With the excess brine, he may cook collards or use it in his house-made aïoli or tartar sauce.

And at Drink in Boston, they like to say, “It’s a cocktail party every night!” Need a little something to go with that kombucha and blood orange martini with bacon infusion? How about an assortment of chef de cuisine Chris Henry’s, pickles. At various times of the year, he may have pickled carrots, fennel, grapes (red, green, and Muscat), Brussels sprouts, maybe even ramps or Cippollini onions.

But Don’t Ask for a Pickleback at Drink

“Beer before whiskey, very risky;” but what about whiskey before brine?  Due diligence for this article had me in search of a Pickleback (it’s a gritty job but somebody’s got to do it). I had been hearing about this drink phenomenon, albeit mostly from tattooed 20-somethings, but, hey, if it’s good enough for a New York Times food columnist to write about (Got Your Pickleback, New York Times, 3/14/2010), it’s good enough for me. But Drink stopped serving Picklebacks. Henry says he wants to avoid serving shots: “You can get those everywhere.” He concentrates on serving cocktails. Fine, I’ll take my business somewhere else. I found a sympathetic young bartender in Ben Cogswell at Kitchen in Boston.

A Pickleback is a shot of whiskey, traditionally Irish, served with a pickle brine chaser. Slug the whiskey, slug the brine. The belief is that the brine neutralizes the sting of the alcohol—so you can drink more I suppose. It is said to have originated in a bar in (dare I say) Brooklyn. While the Pickleback’s peerage is polemical (some say long-haul truck drivers in Texas have always tippled salty pickle juice to mitigate booze’s frequent-rest-stop syndrome; some say it’s a tradition for Russians to grab a gherkin when drinking vodka!), its dive-bar reputation is intact.

At first Ben was a little uncertain of the steps—he had served a Pickleback before but judging by the lack of efficiency in his moves, I could see it had been a while. And I can’t help but think he was a little puzzled serving a Pickleback to a woman old enough to be his mother, at a relatively late hour, on a Tuesday. But with an air of the true professional that he is, Ben held out 2 bottles: Michael Collins Irish Whiskey and, of course, Jameson’s. I chose the Michael Collins. He poured me a shot. Down at the end of the bar was the pickle jar—cucumbers—made by chef de cuisine Eric LeBlanc. I thought I eyed a large jar of eggs floating in brine down there, too. So I asked Eric what else he pickles. Turns out he pickles a lot. “It’s a great preservation method.”

Last year when he got a supply of cherries in season, he pickled them to serve with foie gras. He pickles ramps and serves them in a morel mushroom pasta dish. Some of the fresh produce he pickles is from Siena Farms. And as a further testimony to the vitality of the local craft-food movement, he off-handedly admitted to making his own cheddar, Parmesan-type cheese, bread, and even ice cream—all in his kitchen at Kitchen.  I asked Eric how he thought the Pickleback started and he joked that probably “some drunk guy figured it out.”

Meanwhile, at the bar, Ben was holding a large glass jar of cucumber pickles and pouring pickle brine through a strainer into a shot glass. He set it up in front of me. The whiskey shot looked fine, but the brine looked, well, like brine—a little murky, with some tiny, dark, foreign specs floating in it. I took a sip of the whiskey. Nice. I hesitated, not wanting to replace the flavor of the whiskey with this unattractive, primordial fluid. But I’m a vinegar geek, so I was game.

Contrary to what I was expecting, the brine shot was mild, only faintly vinegar-like. It tasted mostly of cucumber and dill. And it did exactly what it’s purported to do—erased the bite of the alcohol and left a pleasant, savory tang. It was good. I’ll be trying this again.

Recipes

BREAD AND BUTTER REFRIGERATOR PICKLES
By Shelby Larrson, Eat Boutique, eatboutique.com 

Bread and butter pickles, for those who don’t know, are a sweet and sour little pickle that are perfect for burgers and sandwiches of all kinds. Commercial versions of the bread and butter pickle can be awfully sweet, which I don’t always love. This recipe dials down the sugar so it gives some sweetness, but the sour is much more pronounced. I added just a bit of heat with the crushed red pepper, but you could take it step further and add hot peppers instead.

Makes about 2 quarts.

Ingredients
2 pounds Kirby (or pickling) cucumbers, cut into 1/8 inch slices
1 medium white onion, thinly sliced
2 heaping tablespoons coarse or Kosher salt (table salt will discolor your pickles)
2 cups cider vinegar
1 cup white vinegar
1 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon whole mustard seeds
½ teaspoon celery seed
½ teaspoon black peppercorns

Directions

Wash and slice cucumbers; prepare the onion. In a large bowl, toss cucumber slices and onions with the coarse salt to draw out the moisture (this also makes them nice and crunchy). Let them rest on the counter for an hour and a half or in the refrigerator for 3 hours. Rinse the cucumbers well and dispose of any accumulated juices.

In a large pot, add the vinegar, sugar, crushed red pepper flakes and the turmeric. Bring the mixture to a low boil, stirring frequently, until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture is hot.

Add the celery seed, peppercorns and mustard seeds to two clean quart-sized jars. Pack the jars with the cucumber slices, leaving about an inch of headspace at the top of the jar.

Using a large glass measuring cup or something similar, begin to carefully pour the vinegar mixture between the two jars, splitting the liquid evenly. Cap the jars and let them come to room temperature on the counter. Once cool, place the jars in the refrigerator.

Let pickles sit for at least 24 hours before eating. They will be good for about 2-3 weeks (if they last that long).

JJ’S PICKLED PEACHES 
By JJ Gonson, Cuisine en Locale 

Though usually thought of as one of summertime’s sweetest treats, peaches can easily go savory. Spend any time near a healthy, productive peach tree, and you’ll understand why pickling peaches can be essential to preserving the fruit through the year: One can only eat so many pies! Pickle some peaches this summer and take part in the southern Italian tradition of serving pickled peaches with your Christmas dinners. The staff at Cuisine en Locale loves having peaches year-round, so we are always sure to get together and pickle a bunch of peaches during the height of their season. The flavor combinations are endless, so experiment with your favorite herbs and spices.

Ingredients
Peaches
Apple cider vinegar
Maple sugar
Suggested flavors: vanilla pod, star anise, cinnamon stick or savory options such as mustard seeds, cloves or garlic

A proper pickle 
In pickles, it’s the acid in the liquid that kills bacteria, so as a general rule of thumb, you want a 50% acid to water solution. If you are so inclined to test the pH, the liquid’s pH should be 4.6 or less. In our pickled peaches, we use 50% apple cider vinegar and 50% peach juice caught from peeling the fruit.

Choose the right fruit 
Clingstone or freestone peaches both work for this recipe. Clingstones are tastier, but they require a bit more work to process. Choose ripe, but firm peaches. Remember that peaches bruise like… a peach, so be careful when handling the fruit. Bruised peaches don’t look pretty in jars, and bruising actually gives the fruit a slightly bad taste.

Sterilization for storage 
Sterilize your jars per standard sterilization instructions*. If you plan to hold the jars unrefrigerated, follow standard canning instructions, making sure to boil the filled jars for 20 minutes.

Prepping peaches 
Gently wash the peaches and cut a very shallow X in the end of the fruit opposite the stem. Bring a pot of water to a rapid boil. Plunge the peaches into the water for about 2 minutes, or until you see the skin around the X begin to peel back. Remove peaches from water and put them in an ice bath or run cold water over the fruit to stop the cooking. Peel the peaches over a strainer to make sure you catch all the juice. This juice will become the non-acidic portion of your pickling liquid. Slice the fruit into moon shaped wedges.

The pickle 
Combine peach juice with apple cider vinegar in a 1:1 ratio. Make sure that no more than half the total volume is peach juice to ensure proper acidity. For every cup of liquid, add one tablespoon of maple sugar and any flavoring agents you’d like.

Bring liquid to a boil. After two minutes of cooking at a rapid boil, add the peaches. Pack peaches and liquid into the sterilized jars and follow standard canning instructions.

Store for 1 month before using.

*Sterilization of Empty Jars, per National Center for Home Food Preservation All jams, jellies, and pickled products processed less than 10 minutes should be filled into sterile empty jars. To sterilize empty jars, put them right side up on the rack in a boiling-water canner. Fill the canner and jars with hot (not boiling) water to 1 inch above the tops of the jars. Boil 10 minutes at altitudes of less than 1,000 ft. At higher elevations, boil 1 additional minute for each additional 1,000 ft. elevation. Remove and drain hot sterilized jars one at a time. Save the hot water for processing filled jars. Fill jars with food, add lids, and tighten screw bands.

Empty jars used for vegetables, meats, and fruits to be processed in a pressure canner need not be pre-sterilized. It is also unnecessary to pre-sterilize jars for fruits, tomatoes, and pickled or fermented foods that will be processed 10 minutes or longer in a boiling-water canner.

 CORN PICKLE
By Ana Sortun, Oleana and Sofra Bakery + Café 

This delicious quick-pickle can sometimes be found on the mezze bar at Sofra Bakery + Café in Cambridge, especially at the height of corn season. It is a lovely way to prepare the sweet, summer corn we’re all waiting for. Serve as part of a mezze spread, wrapped in a pita, or just as an easy side dish to accompany grilled fish, or chicken.

Ingredients
2 teaspoons finely minced garlic
2 tablespoons good-quality white wine vinegar or sherry vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice
1 teaspoon sugar
Kosher salt
4 cups super-fresh, shucked sweet corn kernels
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup finely chopped sweet summer onion (or red onion)
1 cup finely chopped arrowhead or white cabbage
4 tablespoons finely chopped hot pepper (jalepeño or Hungarian hot wax pepper)
½ cup finely chopped red pepper or green pepper
Dried oregano (optional)
Fresh dill and feta cheese, for serving

Directions

Place the garlic, vinegar, lemon or lime juice, and sugar in a large mixing bowl and set aside for 10 minutes. Add the corn and season with salt.

Meanwhile, sauté the onion, cabbage, hot pepper and bell pepper in olive oil over medium-low heat until it becomes soft and translucent. Add a pinch of dried oregano, if using. Allow the mixture to cool for 5–10 minutes, then stir it into the corn. Season the mixture with salt to taste.

Serve with chopped fresh dill and feta cheese.

 PICKLED TURNIPS AND BEETS 
Adapted from the Boston Food Swap, by way of a recipe by David Lebovitz 

Editor’s note: These delicious, vibrant-pink, Middle-eastern style pickles were introduced to us by Tricia Schwarz some years ago at the Boston Food Swap. We loved them so much, serving them in salads and in sandwiches but also on cheese plates and charcuterie platters, that we requested the recipe to print here. Turns out, the ever-talented David Lebovitz created them, and we tweaked his preparation a bit by adding some whole spices to the brine.

Ingredients
3 cups water
1/3 cup coarse white salt, such as kosher salt or sea salt
1 bay leaf
1 teaspoon whole allspice berries
1 teaspoon whole black tellicherry peppercorns
1 cup distilled white vinegar
2 pounds turnips, peeled
1 small beet, or a few slices from a regular-size beet, peeled
3 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced

Directions
In a saucepan, heat about 1/3 of the water. Add the salt, bay leaf, allspice and peppercorns, stirring until the salt is dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature. Once cool, add the vinegar and the rest of the water.

Meanwhile, cut the turnips and the beet into batons, about the size of French fries. Put the turnips, beets and garlic slices into a large, clean jar, then pour the spiced, salted brine over them; be sure to tuck the bay leaf into the jar as well.

Cover and let sit at cool room temperature for one week. Once done, they should be refrigerated until ready to serve (they are not a “shelf-stable” storage pickle). They will be strong in flavor but will mellow with age, and should be eaten within 4–6 weeks.