Rather than asking what is being pickled these days, the better question might be: “What isn’t?”
Bone marrow, watermelon and cheese are among the unlikely items now floating in chefs’ cures.
Chef Ivy Stark of Amalia restaurant in New York pickles red onions in a vanilla-spiked cure of rice vinegar and sugar to “create something a little different,” she says. “Pickles add such an amazing punch to a lot of dishes.”
And a plethora of pickles—creative and classic renditions—are popping up in all kinds of restaurants beyond fine dining, especially in Cuban sandwiches, the latest darling of casual and fast-food R&D executives.
“I’ll pickle anything I can get my hands on,” Stark says.
Recently she got ahold of a “big combination” of shell beans, including cranberry, runner and fava. She blanched each variety separately and then pickled the beans in vinegar flavored with fresh oregano, chives, parsley and basil. The beans remained in the liquid until just cool and kept a “beautiful vibrant green” color for a full day, Stark says. She served the bean salad special for $12 with tempura-style squash blossoms.
Stark’s vanilla-onion pickles top a $14 hamachi crudo that currently is on Amalia’s appetizer menu. For those she pickles the thinly sliced onions daily and pours off most the liquid so they remain slightly crunchy. She drizzles a touch of the cure on the plates, so as not to waste a flavorful medium.
Pickled golden raisins flavor Amalia’s stuffed crispy chicken romesco with chorizo sausage, mixed greens and toasted almond, which sells for $26. The sweet-and-sour raisins are a nice counterpoint to the spicy sausage, Stark says. The raisins sit in the refrigerator for anywhere from two days to a month in a cure of Champagne vinegar, brown sugar, mustard seeds and a smoky chile.
Pickled fennel is favored by many chefs. At Gordon Ramsay’s newly reformulated Maze in New York, for instance, chef de cuisine Josh Emett’s summer menu debuted with pickled fennel on steamed fluke and scallops with basil and tomato vinaigrette. The dish is included in a two-course, $25 menu.
For a slight Asian touch, Emett seasons a standard salt, sugar, water and vinegar cure with crushed lemon grass, ginger, garlic, tarragon, coriander seeds, chervil, star anise and bay leaves. He brings the liquid and seasonings to a boil and then adds paper-thin sliced fennel to the room-temperature brine. The fennel cures overnight.
At Sevilla in Santa Barbara, Calif., chef-partner E. Michael Reidt offers pickled fennel with “smoked-to-order” wild king salmon, buttered crab, pea mousseline and glazed salmon belly for $28.
Chef Stephanie Izard of the 50-seat Scylla restaurant in Chicago teamed a lump crab salad with pickled fennel. The salad sports shaved asparagus and toasted almonds and was her course at the annual “Girl Food Dinner” that raises funds for hunger relief in her city. For what she calls a “quick pickle,” she added shaved fennel to a hot cure of white balsamic vinegar, sugar and salt. The fennel pickled until the concoction just cooled.
Izard also pickles rhubarb in the same mixture and cures it just 20 minutes to retain the red color and so it “doesn’t get mushy,” she says.
Izard, whose restaurant carries a $40 average check, sells spring green salad with the pickled rhubarb, feta and basil-lime vinaigrette for $7.
“Pickles bring some more acidity to the dish,” she says.
Sister restaurants Blackbird and Avec, also in Chicago, offer a variety of pickles. Avec teams prosciutto di Parma with Georgia peaches, pickled feta, red onion, arugula and mint and sells it for $20. The “Avec-style paella” comes with blood sausage, shrimp, mussels, pickled onion and red pepper relish for $16.
Blackbird’s crispy buckwheat crêpes with hazelnut “cassoulet” include fresh ricotta, grilled abalone mushrooms and pickled baby carrots for $25. Pickled ramps come at the same eatery with a charcuterie plate featuring game bird terrine, fingerlings and soft boiled quail egg, $13. A seared Alaskan halibut with Swiss chard, fried capers, pine nuts and preserved lemon purée is finished with pickled bone marrow and spring onions for $28.
Ecco restaurant in Atlanta pickles okra, cauliflower, red carrot, pearl onion and other vegetables for a garnish on its V12 signature Bloody Mary, $11, which beverage director Vajra Stratigos calls “a supercharged tomato juice beverage.”
“We took tomatoes and puréed them and then infused the purée with lots of herbs for a super-seasoned mixture,” he says.
The drink’s glass is rimmed with smoked sea salt. Burger Bar in the Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas offers sandwich topping choices of house-made pickled green tomatoes for 95 cents and pickled beetroot for 50 cents. And house-cured pickles are on the menu for the 5th annual Mesa Verde Country Wine & Art Festival scheduled next month in Colorado, where a $75-per-person wine-maker’s dinner will feature a menu of Southwestern and Native American specialties, including “gaucho grilled locally raised beef coulot” with executive chef Todd Halnier’s local-vegetable pickles.
In Portsmouth, N.H., chef-owner Evan Mallett’s Southern Mediterranean menu at the newly opened Black Trumpet Bistro highlights pickled quail egg served in a phyllo nest with Spanish ham and aïoli for $6.50. Mallet pickles the yellow-colored eggs in a cure with saffron, cardamom, mustard seeds, cinnamon sticks, fennel, juniper berries and grains of paradise.
“The best flavor occurs between days two and five [of curing],” Mallett says. “I’ve loved pickles since I was a little kid, and now I am fascinated by any process that transforms a familiar food into something less familiar.”
In Boston, Aujourd’ hui restaurant sells pork tenderloin with pickled daikon radish, savoy cabbage and pork belly hot pot for $36. In New York, Café Gray’s chef de cuisine Larry Finn and his team pickle about 5,000 pounds of ramps in the spring. The ramp bulbs are blanched, then cured in a hot brine prepared with equal parts rice wine vinegar and sugar with a small amount of salt.
“They stay forever,” Finn says, “and we use the juice in vinaigrettes for an oniony-garlic flavor.”
Finn purées remaining ramp greens for pesto used in family meals. For a $38 halibut with lemon-verbena butter, Finn caramelizes the pickled ramp bulbs and serves them with pickled bok choy stems. Pickled green papaya also finish Café Gray’s signature braised short ribs, also priced at $38.
Fried pickles come with fried green tomatoes, onion rings and Texas “toothpicks” in a $12.99 sampler platter at Sudie’s Catfish and Seafood House in League City, Texas. The toothpicks are fried jalapeños. At the new Lüke restaurant in New Orleans, chef-owner John Besh describes his cuisine as “Alsace meets New Orleans” with dishes like pâté of Texas wild boar and watermelon pickles that are cured with a pepper sauce-spiked cure. That dish is priced at $8.
At many casual operations Cuban sandwiches with prerequisite pickles have caught on these days.
“You have to have pickles, or it isn’t a Cuban sandwich,” says Art Nermoe, executive chef of 18-unit, Plymouth, Minn.-based Granite City Food & Brewery.
But for a touch of creativity, Granite City’s Cubans come on a grilled ciabatta with roasted pork loin, roasted garlic aïoli, yellow mustard and smoked turkey, instead of the traditional ham. The turkey “lightens up the sandwich a little,” Nermoe says. It sells for $9 with chips or coleslaw.
Another play on the classic is under construction at IHOP, says Jay Miller, the company’s director of research and development. The pancake-centric restaurants, which are franchised and operated by Glendale, California-based International House of Pancakes, Inc., with approximately 1,300 outlets, may soon offer a Cuban burger, with some elements of the classic sandwich intact, including, of course, the pickle.