Is Your Brine In A Pickle?

I know you canners are already preparing jars to preserve this year's produce at its peak, but perhaps it's time we give a little more attention to the pickling liquid itself. I talked with a couple expert preservationists about how they go about concocting the ideal bath for the season's bounty.

Over the last 18 years, McClure’s pickles built a business based on his family’s original recipe (thank you Great Grandma Lala!): white distilled vinegar, water, salt and super fresh produce. “You can’t take bad produce and make it into a good pickle just because of your brine,” says co-founder Bob McClure. He’s not using chemical preservatives like big brands boasts McClure, “we’re known as more of an acidic pickle, like Vlasic, which is salty, but we don’t add any calcium chloride or potassium sorbate, mold and yeast inhibitors,” —  he’s letting the plucky spirit of vinegar do its work, yielding a clean flavorful product. 

Aside from the obvious — consummate cucumbers — sourcing quality vinegar matters most. “We look closely at vendors we’re buying from, how are you making it, what’s going into it, what grain strength,” McClure answers, which includes SSS vinegar supply from Houston, Texas, and Fitz Old out of Wisconsin. When Bob started the business, he used to buy gallon jugs of commodity vinegar. Now, he’s pumping 5000 gallon truckloads of premium stuff into their vinegar silos in downtown Detroit every couple of months.

Apple cider vinegar combines with white distilled for McClure’s Sweet & Spicy, as well as Bread & Butter pickles, using ACV’s natural sweetness as a sugar replacement, whereas garlic, dill and chiles also find their way into jars with a sundry of cut styles, from whole cucumbers to sliced and speared. But what’s most exciting and new to McClure’s offerings is a refrigerated pickle. “Similar to Claussen and Grillo’s — it’s a cold brine, whereas the rest of McClure’s current products are hot fill pasteurized. [The pickles stay] crunchier longer, uniquely fresher, and it’s a little more than 50% vinegar,” teases McClure. It’s back to basics, belabors McClure, who proclaims, “cucumbers are not going to add too much additional flavor to influence the brine — the brine is more flavorful than cucumber itself.”

Steve McHugh, chef/co-owner of Cured at Pearl in San Antonio, Texas wrote an entire book on the art form, called Cured: Cooking with Ferments, Pickles, Preserves & More. Whereas premium produce is pivotal for his season farmhouse fare, it’s really how he thinks about his pickling program that’s paramount. “[Our pickling program is all about] what my farmer brings me, and what’s in the fridge [that’s about to turn] that doesn’t need to be in the fridge,” notes McHugh. But there’s more to pickling than just reacting to the ebb and flow of the market — there’s a strategy to how McHugh preps fruits and vegetables before they even go in the jar. Okra’s left whole, green beans get stemmed, and cauliflower is cut into bite-sized florets. Tomatoes get cored, watermelon rinds are peeled to remove their tough green skin, and squash seeds are discarded. 

“[Steve] thinks about the vegetable’s density, too. Does it require a blanch? Should it be hot brine versus cold? Should he salt it first?” says Paula Forbes, his co-author of Cured the book. Once this is settled, he goes about concocting the brine, selecting the vinegar that will best pair with the fruit or vegetable at hand, based on flavor. “Are they going to work together or compete?” he says.

Often, McHugh leans hard on the clarity of white wine or rice wine vinegars when it comes to produce with lighter flavors, like cucumbers. Marukan is his favorite rice wine vinegar, in which he prepares a brine that’s a 1:1:1 combination of vinegar, sugar and salt. “It’s the perfect ratio every time,” says McHugh, bright and balanced, “I don’t want the pickling liquid to take over the pickle.”

McClure’s photos courtesy of Joe Gall aka Camera Jesus, and Amanda Chewtown

*Reprinted with permission from Cured by Steve McHugh & Paula Forbes, copyright © 2024. Photographs by Denny Culbert. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.