Summertime in this city is hot. A day outside will leave you covered in a shiny, salty sweat that not even a shady spot under a tree will help. One way to cool down is with food and drink. An iced tea or cold beer serves that end. But to replenish the salt lost through perspiration, it’s good to find something cold and salty to satiate. A cold pickle on a hot day is crunch, salt, and sour that wakes up a body exhausted from the heat and humidity. The summer months, when the local crops are fruiting, are perfect for making pickles. Bumper crops of cucumbers, summer squash, okra, or beans are all great for pickling, a traditional method ofpreservation that involves soaking food in brine.
Several chefs around town appreciate the pickle and have incorporated the acid into their menu, often as an accompaniment to another dish. Some chefs, however, embrace the pickle for all its salt and give it its own space on the menu. I like to call these all-pickle appetizers pickle plates. A variety of pickles can be found on the city’s pickle plates, as chefs move beyond the traditional cucumber spear. Many crops are good for pickling, including cabbage, beans, beets, okra, onions, and summer squash. Traditional pickles such as chow-chow, kimchi, and sauerkraut each have an unknowable number of methods and ingredients. Each pickle is of its maker and that maker’s place. The same is true in Louisville, as pickle cooks are creating a great variety of pickles for this summer’s dining.
Garage Bar
700 East Market Street
At $3.75, this is a standard pickled vegetable plate with a pile of three different pickles. When I visited, they were serving pickled cauliflower, carrots, and fennel. The pickles are soaked in the same simple, house-made salt and vinegar brine, which adds a rustic flavor to each vegetable. These are cowboy pickles – crunchy and sour. On other occasions, I’ve seen pickled beets, broccoli, cucumber, and mushrooms on the plate.
Heart & Soy
1216 Bardstown Road
The takeout side of this dual restaurant has a house-made Vietnamese pickle dish. When owner and chef CoCo Tran introduced these pickles onto the menu as an accompaniment to other dishes, so many people asked for the pickles by themselves that she started packaging and selling them for individual sale. Vegan, crisp, and sweet, these pickles are a popular take-away snack. I purchased one of these to-go snack dishes for $3.19 and ate it on-site. The plate is made up of cabbage, cauliflower, celery, and carrots that have been pickled in a sweet brine of salt, vinegar, and sugar. The pickles are similar to those Tran knew from Vietnamese street markets. Intuition told me to add Sriracha sauce and Tran reinforced my decision, noting that’s how she prefers her pickles too.
Holy Grale
1034 Bardstown Road
Chef Joshua Lehman and his team in the Holy Grale kitchen understand the connection between the two fermented foods: pickles and beer.
“It’s a beer place and it just comes natural,” said Lehman. “We’re doing all the fermentables.”
The $5 pickle plate at the Holy Grale is well-made and presented. The night I went, the plate came with pickled beets and fennel, as well as kimchi and a spicy Szechuan cucumber pickle. Baguette crostini and stone ground mustard rounded off the plate. The pickle production at the Holy Grale is careful and intentional.
“We look at pickling the same way as building a dish,” said Lehman.
The golden beets were roasted in a pan of vinegar, a more subtle pickling technique, according to Lehman. He added coriander, orange, and fennel seed to the fennel pickle, changing the vegetable in a way that preserved and enhanced the inherent anise flavor. The traditional Korean kimchi, an international adaptation of regionally available winter vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and daikon radish, was neither too salty nor fishy. The Szechuan cucumber pickles were one spicy option on the plate, a newer creation for the kitchen inspired by a local farmer’s early cucumbers. I was told to come back a couple days later for another assortment of pickles on the Holy Grale’s super seasonal pickle plate.
Pops’ Pepper Patch
Habagardil pickles at Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market
1722 Bardstown Road
Pickles at the farmers’ market are a do-it-yourself option for a pickle plate. It’s a progressive pickle plate, sampled from the vendors in various markets throughout the city. By far the hottest pickle in town can be found at the Bardstown Road Farmers’ Market. Ken Hubsch is the vendor for Bill Kamman’s Pops’ Pepper Patch pickles, called Habagardil for their unique blend of habanero peppers, garlic, and dill. The Habagardil cucumber pickle has been adapted to all spice abilities and comes in mild, spicy, and extreme heat. There are also OMG Habagardil pickles made with the ghost chile, naga bhut jolokia. The ghost pepper is often considered the hottest pepper in the world and, like the rest of Kamman’s habanero peppers, is grown on a small farm in Mount Washington, Ky. Hubsch was also sampling some of the hottest pickles that Kamman produces, which are 15 times as hot as the OMG Habagardil pickles. They are to be eaten one at a time and, although making absolute statements can be presumptuous, it just might be true that this is the hottest pickle west of the Alleghenies.
Sour Power
at Douglass Loop Farmers’ Market
2005 Douglass Boulevard
A few blocks south, at the Douglass Loop Farmers’ Market, you can find some of the only fermented pickles in town. Brian Geier and Melissa Calhoun of Sour Power make all their own fermented pickles in Franklin County. They ferment the fruits and vegetables that they grow on two acres of land. As opposed to being pickled in hot brine, these pickles are fermented in nothing more than salt. Fermented pickles have living bacteria that promote good digestion. They are also raw, preserving the maximum number of nutrients. Geier came to fermenting pickles out of a desire to be self-employed through farming. Value-added foods, Geier found, would enable him to be economically self-sufficient off of a small piece of land. Fermenting is simple; all that is required is salt, the item to be pickled, time, and a commercial kitchen space.
Geier develops the recipes used at Sour Power himself. To use up a cover crop of turnips, he made 12 small batches of fermented turnips, each recipe slightly different. Geier recorded what qualities of which recipes he liked best and used that information to develop the recipe for his turnip pickles, made with the coriander and cilantro growing in the same field. His best selling ferments are the cucumbers, which he makes with garlic and dill. He just sold out of the pickles he made last season, but he has a spring kimchi fermenting now and is developing several new recipes for the summer’s cucumber crop. Late summer brings the traditional sauerkraut and the fall brings other ferments, such as his ginger carrot pickles.
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So… what’s the verdict? Best implies one.
Too many perfect permutations of pickles to choose just one, I’d say.