I can't say that I've ever been a fan of commercially made sweet pickles. More often than not, they're cloyingly sweet or too heavily spiced to win me over. That all changed when I encountered a product that showed me what a sweet pickle should be.
Low Country Products, located in South Carolina, makes a line of artisanal pickles, preserves and soups. Their website buzzes with all of the right trigger words: handmade, handpacked, small-batch, farm-driven, local, seasonal-- but ultimately, the proof is in the pickle.
While I can't vouch for any of their other products, the Sweet Cucumber Pickles were an epiphany. The list of ingredients reads like Grandma's recipe: cucumbers, cider vinegar, sugar, garlic and pickling spices. Long after the pickles were gone, I kept the jar of brine because it was just too good to discard.
Miso-glazed black cod was another epiphany. Nobu's iconic dish was the west's introduction to the sustainable sablefish, or black cod, and the ancient method of curing in a sweet and acidic marinade of sugar, sake, mirin, and miso. Using this method with the sweet pickle brine rendered the flesh lush and silky and allowed for deep caramelization without overcooking.
Being an advocate of flowers-as-food, I'm delighted to see that edible flowers are becoming more readily available at grocery stores, though it concerns me that they are being marketed as garnishes and destined to become nothing more than a gratuitous flourish, replacing the token mint sprig on a desert, instead of relevant components of a dish.
Perfumers recreate scent profiles by carefully selecting and blending flower essences-- can't we do the same with flavor?
My intention with this dish was to integrate the flavors in the sweet pickle brine with a purposeful selection of flowers. Yellow and purple chive blossoms reinforce the garlic, dianthus petals (which taste of cloves) supports the warm spices, and the sour bite of oxalis leaves (the flowers close up at night) substantiates the vinegar. Borage, had it flowered in time, would have been a fitting reference to the cucumber.
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