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Why did my pickles have to come from California?


Randomguy

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I like pickles and have wanted real pickles (the old-fashioned fermented kind), but they are almost impossible to find out and about.  I like new pickles or half sours, but even the artisan pickle people around here seem to make them the fast way.  

Anyway, I bought some pickles at Trader Joe's last night.  They are half-sour probiotic and fermented and they are pretty good and from the Sonoma Brinery.  Wouldn't you think someone would fill the void closer to the east coast?  They weren't expensive, but I imagine shipping them this way would have cost a small fortune.

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16 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

I like pickles and have wanted real pickles (the old-fashioned fermented kind), but they are almost impossible to find out and about.  I like new pickles or half sours, but even the artisan pickle people around here seem to make them the fast way.  

Anyway, I bought some pickles at Trader Joe's last night.  They are half-sour probiotic and fermented and they are pretty good and from the Sonoma Brinery.  Wouldn't you think someone would fill the void closer to the east coast?  They weren't expensive, but I imagine shipping them this way would have cost a small fortune.

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Pickle them where they grow.  :) 

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Over the course of the winter, buy cukes and try several different pickle recipes.

Grow a bunch of cukes, put them up, they'll make good Xmas presents as well.

I haven't seen a pickle barrel around here for a very long time. Although there is one deli that has pretty good pickles.

You could also sell them. I even have an ad slogan for you: You'll love a long hard one. :hapydance:

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11 minutes ago, Randomguy said:

Zabars is nice, I used to live really close by.  TJ's is much more budget friendly, you are right.

So I get that confused with this!  Very interesting.  My wife's fambly has eaten there back in the day.

https://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/gallery/historical/a-look-back-at-zaberers-restaurant/collection_c608a9ea-2445-11e6-bb03-7b553a47fb0a.html

5748a9218685f.image.jpg?resize=1200,801

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4 hours ago, RalphWaldoMooseworth said:

So I get that confused with this!  Very interesting.  My wife's fambly has eaten there back in the day.

https://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/gallery/historical/a-look-back-at-zaberers-restaurant/collection_c608a9ea-2445-11e6-bb03-7b553a47fb0a.html

5748a9218685f.image.jpg?resize=1200,801

Those were the good old days.  "United We Stand".  :lol:

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15 minutes ago, Further said:

Guys at work are very proud of their pickling ability. They bring in pickled everything to share and compare, most are willing to share recipes. They are all of the quick variety. Not sure I've ever had a fermented pickle  :dontknow:   

I really miss a real Italian antipasto with pickled veggies.  Too often pizza places make crappy antipasto with very simple ingredients like cold cuts and black olives, etc.  

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9 hours ago, Randomguy said:

Why did my pickles have to come from California?

I like pickles and have wanted real pickles (the old-fashioned fermented kind), but they are almost impossible to find out and about.  I like new pickles or half sours, but even the artisan pickle people around here seem to make them the fast way.  

Anyway, I bought some pickles at Trader Joe's last night.  They are half-sour probiotic and fermented and they are pretty good and from the Sonoma Brinery.  Wouldn't you think someone would fill the void closer to the east coast?  They weren't expensive, but I imagine shipping them this way would have cost a small fortune.

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...mostly for the same reasons much of your other produce comes from California.  We have economies of scale and season here that makes it one of the best places in the United States to produce massive amounts of vegetable produce, like cukes, very competitively in price.  The processing usually happens pretty close to the growing areas, so they stuff (tomatoes, cukes, whatever) can be trucked in and dumped into receiving hoppers.

Quote

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a great followup to recent news that a Steinfeld's pickle plant in North Portland would close. It's not just the pickle plant that's gone. So are the cucumbers from Northwest farmers. Even though labels still tout the brand's Northwest roots. Here's an illustration for the P.I. story that pretty much says it all.

3 states produced 76 percent of U.S. veggies in 2017

Quote

Pickles are not a food in and of themselves. Pickles are made from cucumbers. California and Wisconsin lead in pickle production. Michigan and North Carolina are leading states in commercial cucumber production.

https://www.answers.com/Q/What_states_produces_the_most_pickles

Surprisingly, China produces 54 million tonnes of cucumbers annually, to our pitiful 3/4 million tonnes. I did not know that until I googled it. :)

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20 minutes ago, Page Turner said:

...mostly for the same reasons much of your other produce comes from California.  We have economies of scale and season here that makes it one of the best places in the United States to produce massive amounts of vegetable produce, like cukes, very competitively in price.  The processing usually happens pretty close to the growing areas, so they stuff (tomatoes, cukes, whatever) can be trucked in and dumped into receiving hoppers.

3 states produced 76 percent of U.S. veggies in 2017

Surprisingly, China produces 54 million tonnes of cucumbers annually, to our pitiful 3/4 million tonnes. I did not know that until I googled it. :)

None of that matters, though, any hillbilly can make pickles and there are plenty of farms growing cucumbers out here.  It is just that the locals refused to look at demand and decided to focus on what they wanted to supply instead.  Hicks are myopic, oftentimes.

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...when my second ex-wife (the one from Wisconsin) was a kid, her father used to plant about 1/4 acre in cukes to sell to the local pickling plant there.  It's pretty labor intensive, because for the pickled gherkins, they need to be of a certain small size, so you need to go out there and pick just the ones that are the right size at he proper time.  She had like 8 brothers and sisters, so they had a solid picking crew.

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12 hours ago, Further said:

Guys at work are very proud of their pickling ability. They bring in pickled everything to share and compare, most are willing to share recipes. They are all of the quick variety. Not sure I've ever had a fermented pickle  :dontknow:   

Bittman has a few recipes with quick pickling in them in the food matters cookbook. I’ll probably give that a shot today. 

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On 1/4/2020 at 8:27 AM, Randomguy said:

I like pickles and have wanted real pickles (the old-fashioned fermented kind), but they are almost impossible to find out and about.  I like new pickles or half sours, but even the artisan pickle people around here seem to make them the fast way.  

Anyway, I bought some pickles at Trader Joe's last night.  They are half-sour probiotic and fermented and they are pretty good and from the Sonoma Brinery.  Wouldn't you think someone would fill the void closer to the east coast?  They weren't expensive, but I imagine shipping them this way would have cost a small fortune.

Discus.

Mennonite or Amish are out your way?

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47 minutes ago, donkpow said:

I eat Frank's sauerkraut but my can doesn't say anything about Wisconsin.

I think the Franksville plant is closed down years ago but I think kraut fest is still going.

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9 hours ago, Randomguy said:

It turns out that my sauerkraut came from California, too. 

...I live here in California, and this morning (as a special treat) I bought fresh blueberries from Chile.

I'm not agonizing over the inefficiency of transporting them all that way, because I bought them at Trader Joe's, a California based company. :) 

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...this popped up in today's NY Times: 

 

Usha Prabakaran’s 20-year-old cookbook, crammed with recipes from home cooks, is simple and self-published. But it has become a cult classic in India.

India’s pickle culture goes back thousands of years to when cucumbers and other vegetables were simply preserved in salt. Modern Indian pickles are more complex and probably more delicious, too — hot and tangy, deeply perfumed with aromatics and ground spices. 

Chitra Agrawal, a New York cookbook author and founder of the pickle company Brooklyn Delhi, remembers the ceramic jugs at her grandmother’s home in Bengaluru in southern India, which held lemons in a slushy saltwater brine. This Karnataka-style pickle was seasoned with fresh green chiles and mango ginger, a fruity-tasting rhizome related to turmeric.

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On 1/4/2020 at 5:27 PM, MickinMD said:

The uncooked, very crisp, always-refrigerated Clausen dill spears work for me.

Clausen is headquartered in Illinois but I don't know where they get their cucumbers.  Nor do I care.

I am not sure I believe you.  I expected a multi paragraph follow up soon on the creation of the Clausen cucumber.

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1 hour ago, jsharr said:

 I expected a multi paragraph follow up soon on the creation of the Clausen cucumber.

The company C. F. Claussen & Sons was founded by Claus Claussen Sr. in Chicago in May 1870.[8][9] Claussen was a vegetable farmer on land that today is in the Chicago city limits at 51st and South Western Blvd. He had a surplus crop of cucumbers one year, and so he decided to pickle them. Claussen pickles were produced on the same piece of land until 1976 when the plant moved to Woodstock, Ill.[10]

Claus Claussen Sr. was succeeded by his son Claus S. Claussen, who was serving as president of the company when he died following an automobile accident on December 20, 1932.[11]

For some years, William C. Claussen (b. 1890) served as president of the Claussen Pickle Company.[12]

The company was sold to Oscar Mayer in 1970 and moved to Woodstock in 1976. Oscar Mayer was later acquired by General Foods in 1981, who in turn merged with Kraft, Inc. in 1990 to form Kraft General Foods, renamed Kraft Foods in 1995.

In 2002, the investment group that owned Vlasic Pickles sought to acquire the Claussen brand as well. The Federal Trade Commission blocked the proposed merger on the grounds that it would have severe anti-competitive effects, leading to a monopoly in the refrigerated-pickle market. *

 

*previously covered on our show, "Pickle Wars":

In a 1992 television advertisement, Claussen pickles were shown to snap under pressure, whereas unidentified competing brands merely bent without snapping. In response, Vlasic Foods Inc. submitted a complaint to an advertising industry tribunal, claiming that the commercial was unfair and misleading.[4] Ultimately, however, the claims of Claussen were upheld by the tribunal

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