Pickle-flavored what?! Check out some unusual Picklesburgh items
Picklesburgh is upon us!
The annual gathering for connoisseurs of all things pickles, Picklesburgh, is set for this Friday through Sunday on the Rachel Carson Bridge and Riverside on the 10th Street Bypass in Downtown Pittsburgh.
If there’s one thing we know about Picklesburgh, it’s an event that stretches the imagination when it comes to pickles as ingredients for everything from alcohol to donuts and, in some cases, may not be appropriate for those with sensitive gag reflexes.
With that in mind, here’s five unusual pickle concoctions you’ll find at this year’s Picklesburgh event.
Ice cream
Might as well start with something cold for a hot summer’s day.
Years ago, the folks at Picklesburgh invited Pittsburgh’s own Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream to make a pickle-flavored ice cream. It went over so well that Millie’s is also doing a dill pickle flavored sorbet, which is back by popular demand this year and sure to produce many a puckered face.
“It’s a heck of a lot of fun,” said Melissa Horst, Millie’s vice-president of retail operations. “Pickles are much more than what our minds leap to when we’re thinking of Vlasic or something like that. You can pickle all kinds of things. So, we like the challenge of creating flavors that are fun and delicious and still fit that theme.”
Horst said a lot of times Millie’s will pickle fruit and create a flavor from that. “It’s not all cucumber pickle stuff. It’s other pickled items,” she said.
Horst said some people are “shocked” by the taste of pickle ice cream, but overall they are pleasantly surprised.
Cotton candy
It began with a pickle juice soda and as Chris Beers, owner of Grandpa Joe’s Candy Shops, tried to outdo himself each year, there were pickles marinated in cherry Kool-Aid, pickle salt water taffy, pickle lollipops and eventually, pickle-flavored cotton candy.
It melts in your mouth just as any other cotton candy does, except that it has a dill pickle flavor to it and will turn your tongue green.
Beers contacted a cotton candy manufacturer in Iowa to come up with the pickle-flavored version.
“She thought I was a little crazy,” Beers said. “But I said, ‘just trust me on this.’ Putting the pickle twist on it made it weird, made it unique. Customers go crazy for it.”
The pickle-flavored cotton candy ended up receiving national news coverage and will be a featured item once again at this year’s Picklesburgh.
Rye whiskey
This was probably not something the Pennsylvanians who invented rye whiskey long ago had envisioned. But the folks at Wigle Whiskey Distillery in Pittsburgh are bringing their pickled rye whiskey back to Picklesburgh.
In this case, Wigle takes an un-aged rye whiskey and macerates it with various pickling spices such as dill, garlic, mustard, caraway, coriander and sugar.
“A lot of people expected it to be this sour, vinegary drink, but it actually ends up being very savory,” said Richard Platania, Wigle’s senior director of operations. “It makes a nice Bloody Mary, it makes a nice whiskey sour and an interesting take on a dirty martini as well.”
With so many pickle-themed items available in Pittsburgh, Platania said they wanted to try and do something unique.
“We wanted to do something that wasn’t just us taking pickle juice and adding it to an existing whiskey.”
Cupcakes
It’s hard to imagine. Jumbo gourmet cupcakes infused with dill pickles. But it’s a thing and according to Patti Schvabenitz, owner of Patti’s Pastries in Aliquippa where they are made, they are delicious.
“When we heard about the festival, we wanted to be in it but I thought ‘Oh, how is that going to work?’ But surprisingly there are a lot of pickled things that can be used that are very delicious,” Schvabenitz said.
So, she came up with her famous “Dilly Dilly Dillicious” cupcake. Its main ingredient is vanilla cake batter infused with dill pickles.
“When you taste it, you’re like ‘this is really good.’ ”
And according to Schvabenitz, it sells out each year. In all, she has three main flavors including a “death by chocolate” cupcake and a maple, bourbon, bacon cupcake.
“That one is stuffed with bourbon, maple and pickles in the buttercream. It’s amazing as well,” she said. “We wanted to provide people with something they would eat and enjoy instead of throwing it in the trash after they took one bite.”
Chocolate-covered pickles
Chocolate-covered pickles on a stick anyone? Or how about a frozen chocolate drink mixed with pickle juice? You can have your pick, courtesy of Chocolate Moonshine Company of Grove City.
So, what could have possibly inspired this?
“We have some creative chocolatiers who have a passion for dill pickles,” said Brandon Krause, Chocolate Moonshine Company’s director of operations. “Everybody loves our sipping chocolate now, so we figured why not add a little pickle kick to it.”
This is the first time the pickled sipping chocolate is being made available and Krause expects it to be a big hit with Picklesburgers.
“We’ve product tested it here in our flagship store in Grove City and if the customers like pickles, they like the drink,” he said. “We expect the same at Picklesburgh. We expect to have people coming back each day, talking about it, taking photos of it and sharing the joy.”
And at the end of the day, isn’t that what Picklesburgh is really all about?
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