On to lighter fare: I absolutely love fermented foods. When I was a kid, my mum ate a lot of sauerkraut, and I hated it. I’m not sure when this changed, but it may have been when I spent about 18 hours in Korea waiting for a connection. KAL put me up in a tiny little hotel room in Incheon, and I went out for lunch and ate something unidentified, with a side of kim chi, and was hooked.
Periodically, I make monster batches of kim chi using a recipe originally at the Pyong Yang Metro website (recipe is no longer there) and now available on food.com. I’ve never used fish sauce or any similar flavouring, but I do use considerably more garlic, sugar, and chili powder than the recipe calls for, and I let it sit for at least four, and sometimes five or six or seven days to get extra ripe.
Luckily for me and the million-something other people who live in or near Seattle, there are some fermenting wizards who live here and make all sorts of fermented foods, sold as Britt’s Pickles. They’ve an outlet in Pike Place and you can find them in some local shops, including PCC. In addition to a few different types of kim chi and sauerkraut, they make a range of astonishingly good pickles. A person can buy a glass jar of five of these pickles for $9.99 at PCC, which sounds expensive until you’ve tried them.
Or–and here’s where it gets good–a person can buy those same pickles for 99c each. These pickles are crisp and snappy, have a really incredible bite to them, and the hint of effervescence that only comes from fermentation. If you buy in jars, they also make a hot and sour pickle, which is a fiery treat.
The truly amazing thing about buying pickles in bulk is that you can put a single pickle in the large quart plastic containers at the grocery store and fill the container the rest of the way with the brine that they’re floating in. I understand there’s some controversy over whether fermented foods actually confer significant health benefits or, in the alternative, cause stomach cancer, but I give precisely zero shits, because this pickle juice is the salty nectar of the bacterial gods. My mouth starts watering when I think about it, keeps watering as I’m drinking it, and then waters more when I force myself not to drink an entire quart at once.
I mixed it with gin and it was OK, too.
I may post more about food at some point, or I’ll just leave you with a single and fervent recommendation: Eat Britt’s Pickles.