Now that’s a pickle plate!
Comfort Kitchen, an upscale burger joint in our town, puts together an excellent pickle plate. Browse the pictures in their Yelp listing and you’ll see how it has evolved over time. There’s always a cucumber pickle, always pickled onions, turmeric pickled cauliflower, pickled carrots and some kind of wild card pickle that varies with the seasons.
The goal seems to provide the widest possible variety in the ingredients, how the vegetables are cut and how the pickles are seasoned. You can put some on your burger and much the rest… pickle heaven! And the menu price (as I recall—pickles are on hiatus at the moment) is around $4 which is easy on the wallet yet entails maybe a 10% food cost for the establishment.
We decided to put together our own pickle plate and were particularly pleased with the result. Here’s the deconstructed view of our components, going clockwise starting at 12 o’clock:
Turmeric Cauliflower Pickles: there are favorite at Comfort Kitchen and it’s easy to see why. They’re a perfect sweet/sour balance and the exotic whiff of curry and turmeric makes you feel heathy.
Guido’s Half Sours: we were planning to use David Chang’s Quick Pickles as our cucumber component, but wanted to see how a lacto ferment would get along with a vinegar pickle. They went together just fine.
Pickled Red Onions: we used this recipe, but sliced them lengthwise rather than into rings so you end up with pickle strands which are easy to add to a burger. Not as Instagrammable as rings, but a more efficient use of product with very little waste.
Pickled Rutabagas: this is our hat-tip to Comfort Kitchen’s strategy of always including one novelty pickle. Based on our Pickled Turnips Mediterranean-Style recipe, but using the turnip’s denser cousin and without beets since we already had a red component in the onions.
Carrot Pickles with Ginger and Anise: we wanted to include a rice vinegar pickle, but this was a little mild compared to the other strong flavors and we might amp up the spices next time. (But do try the recipe on its own; not all pickles have to be intense.) If we had been using our rice vinegar pickled onion recipe, the carrots might have been pickled escabeche-style, with lots of oregano and garlic.
Here’s the pickle plate served to my Yelp friend Steve N. at Comfort Kitchen.
About the pickling method: all these were refrigerator pickles, designed for quick consumption within a few days, so we could skip the complications of a water bath for canning. Our general technique (see individual recipes for variations) was to boil the vinegar/spice liquid to bring out the flavors, add the vegetables to the cooking liquid and let it return to the boil, then cool to room temperature and transfer to refrigerator jars. For denser product, like carrots and rutabaga, leave at a simmer for a few extra minutes. For more delicate veggies, like cauliflower florets, omit the return-to-boil time.
Looks great, thank you for sharing!
Thank you Shawn. Hope you try a few of these recipes!