Matt: Oh, hey Manny.
Manny: Hey Matt.
Matt: How's it going?
Manny: Pretty good.
Matt: I heard you went to a pickle festival.
Manny: So, we did.
We went to Pittsburgh for Picklesburgh—their annual pickle festival—to learn a bit about
the science and history behind pickling.
It's the fourth annual Picklesburgh.
Great time.
As you can probably tell, it was sponsored by Heinz.
Matt: Makes sense.
Manny: And everyone's eating a bunch of pickled stuff.
Woman: The Eau de Pickle, is an unaged rye whiskey.
It's an 80 proof steeped in pickling spices.
Man: I'm kind of looking for a pickle beer, but as of now it's like pickle soda.
Manny: And then there's pickle ice cream Pickle egg rolls
Stuffed pickles. Oh man.
Matt: So why is Pittsburgh Picklesburgh?
Manny: I mean, isn't it obvious?
Yeah, well to answer that question, you really need to go straight to the horse's mouth.
That's why me and David Vinson, cameraman for ACS, we went to Pittsburgh and talked
to some picklers there.
Like John Patterson, who runs Pittsburgh Pickle Co. with two of his brothers.
They're supercute.
And they love to tell people about why Pittsburgh is a great place to do pickling.
John Patterson: Pittsburgh is all German, tons of German influence.
We're all German, essentially.
So we kind of just grew up with that being part of what you ate.
You didn't think twice about it.
And Heinz being originally from Pittsburgh really kind of commercialized that whole idea
of canning and creating all the different varieties and things.
And it's really crazy to get, I don't know how many people show up to this thing.
but we're here celebrating a vegetable essentially.
Which is kind of enlightening.
Matt: I'm with him.
It's wild that pickling has that kind of pull in Pittsburgh.
Manny: Yeah, and it's not just Pittsburgh that goes wild for pickles.
And it's not just cucumbers that get pickled.
It all starts a really, reall long time ago.
We're talking thousands of years ago.
If you look in India, people pickle mangoes.
In Korea they have kimchi.
Sauerkraut in Europe, which actually is thought to have come from China.
A lot of people like to ferment stuff.
And basically, fermentation is important because it allows people to store food longer.
And Chatham University—just outside of Pittsburgh—recently opened a food studies institute that tackles
sustainability problems and finds solutions, like fermentation.
And we went there to talk to food studies and microbiology professors Sally Frey and
Sherie Edenborn about what they're doing.
Sherie Edenborn: Fermentation is such an important mode of food preservation and we were talking
before you came here about how it was the artists and the early observers—because
fermentation has been around for a very long time—and they did it because they didn't
have any other methods for food preservation.
They didn't have refrigerators unless they found an ice cave.
Manny: Which are about as readily available as you'd think, which is that they're
not very readily available.
So most people had to resort to the pickling thing to get them through the winter.
Matt: So right now, I can look you in the eye and say I definitely know that fermenting
food makes it last longer.
But I actually don't know why that is.
Manny: Basically, it's letting good bacteria do their thing and digest sugar in the food
while keeping bad bacteria from spoiling it.
Fermentation happens when microbes, like bacteria or yeast, are cut off from oxygen in a bottle
or a jar.
Manny: With pickles, the salty brine draws water and sugars out of the cucumber to where
bacteria like lactobacillus and Leuconostoc float around and eat them.
They digest those sugars and produce new compounds like lactic acid, acetic acid, and CO2.
All that makes the brine more acidic, and it makes the cucumber shrivel up and look
more like the pickles we're familiar with.
And fermented foods run the gamut.
You have yogurt and cheese, beer and wine.
But then you have stuff like chocolate.
If you make chocolate from unfermented cocoa beans, it tastes way different than the chocolate
we know.
Matt: I did not know that.
Manny: Few do.
If you're pickling cucumbers, the fermentation there is called lactofermentation because
it mainly produces lactic acid.
So let's pretend you're a farmer in Germany like 1,000 years ago.
Matt: Into it.
Manny: You plant your cucumbers in the summer, harvest in fall, then you want to save some
to eat in the winter.
You add some brine, some salt, and water.
You'll pack them in a barrel, airtight, Manny: and what you're doing is creating
an environment where bacteria that produce lactic acid have an advantage over other bacteria,
that will make you sick, like listeria and botulinum.
Of course, as a medieval farmer, you don't know exactly what you're doing;
you justknow that it works.
Matt: Story of my life.
But it's like Sherie Edenborn was saying earlier, that pickling really was an art before
it was a science.
Manny: Well, it was based on observing what happens when you put something new in a barrel
with your pickles and then seeing what comes out.
That kind of observation is how all science starts.
So, like, medieval pickler Matt might put oak leaves or tea in his brine because it
made crisper pickles.
You would have had no idea that the reason they were crisper is that tannins in the leaves,
such as gallotannic acid, were shutting down enzymes that broke down the cucumbers' cell
walls and made them mushy.
Matt: Admittedly, modern Matt didn't know that either.
Manny: Well, now we do know all about tannins.
And, more importantly, we know lactic acid bacteria like lactobacillus and their buddies
are the ones making lactic acid and flavor compounds, and even antimicrobial molecules
like hydrogen peroxide as they eat the sugars coming out of the cucumber.
That drives the brine's pH down and it keeps unwanted bacteria at bay.
It also gives more types of lactic acid bacteria a chance to eat the sugars, multiply, and
make different flavor molecules.
After a few weeks, those acids and flavor compounds soak back into your cucumber, making
it more sour, and taste more—I guess—pickley.
Today's picklers use that knowledge to skip a few steps.
They add vinegar, or acetic acid, to their brine to bring the pH down and prevent the
cucumber from spoiling.
And because you're not relying on a mess of wild bacteria to do the job, this vinegar,
or acid pickling gives a more consistent pickle.
So that's great for pickling companies like Heinz and Pittsburgh Pickle Co. that want
a consistent product but that are also subject to FDA regulations requiring that pickled
foods be made at a pH value below 4.6.
Matt: So you talked about those two different ways of making pickles, is there a clear-cut
winner in terms of taste?
Manny: Yeah, well, people we talked to said they liked naturally fermented pickles if
they'd tried them, which I would say most people probably haven't in the U.S.
Matt: Really?
Manny: Yeah. It's a more complex flavor.
Because you don't boil the brine or add a bunch of vinegar, you have more bacteria
like Leuconostoc, which would die at higher temperatures, making a wider variety of flavor
compounds.
But, remember, every pickle that's lactofermented is going to be a little different no matter what
That's because in lactofermentation, you rely on wild bacteria, and you don't really
control their populations or the flavor compounds they produce.
Sally Frey: I think that's fabulous.
But I don't have a commercial business.
So when I'm making pickles for my friends, for my family, or for myself, if it's a little
bit kind of a different flavor, I embrace that.
But if you have to sell something as a consistent product, that's really the process that
you're speaking to is that standardization—backing it up with the science.
You don't see on an FDA label, "Salt, cucumbers, water, and serendipity."
Matt: It's cool to think about because we know how this stuff works now but there's
still so much room for the art of pickling.
Manny: Totally.
Sally and Sherie thought so, too.
Sherie Edenborn: Sometimes you get people who don't want to exchange their recipes.
Or you're a snooty scientist who goes in and says, "I know everything about fermentation
that you can't possibly tell me anything I don't know."
Which is totally wrong.
You go in and watch somebody do something and say, "Oh!"
And you think, I know what that's doing in my mind as a scientist, and wow, you figured
it out by, like Sally said, start making a fermentation and paying attention to it and
tasting it and observing it and you're like, brilliant.
Just absolutely brilliant.
Matt: So last question: What was the craziest thing that you saw at Picklesburgh?
Manny: Yeah, there were a few things.
There was pickled cotton candy, and then, oh, there was a pickle-juice-drinking contest.
Matt: That sounds gross.
Manny: Yeah, it looked pretty gross.
Look at that guy.
Matt: So I am legit upset that I have never had a natural pickle before.
Manny: Well, I think we can fix that.
We'll be pickling some cucumbers here at C&EN, and you can join us when we try them
live on Facebook.
Stay tuned for details.
And in the meantime, head to the comments to let us know about your favorite pickled
foods and how you like to pickle them.
For more infomation >> Hurricane Florence strengthens to one of the strongest storms predicted to hit US East Coast - Duration: 1:02. 
No comments:
Post a Comment