Michigan Is the Center of the 'Pickleverse' | Hacker News Reader

Michigan Is the Center of the 'Pickleverse'

crainsdetroit.com

44 pointsrmason28 comments

The McClure's pickles with scotch bonnets are phenomenal; somehow the supply up here in Ontario never keeps up so I always bring some home when I visit Michigan.

The first time I had one of these I was by the lake, popped open the jar right after a dip, and I nearly collapsed from the pleasure of it, serious.

Life hack: once you finish the pickles, slice up a cucumber the same way and top the jar off with vinegar. Maybe throw in another clove of garlic and a habanero. Let it sit for a week in the fridge. The fresh pickles have all the flavor of the original pickles with the extra crunch of fresh cucumber.

Reusing pickle juice is bomb! My dad figured it out. Thinks he deserves some Nobel prize, or something. Pretty good trick. 2 days is all I have patience for.

We have a pickle tankyard in our town. Talk about stink.

i grew up next to a pig farm. Want to trade?

I went to college in a town in Michigan. If the wind blew one way, it was the pickle factory, and the other way, the pig farms.

“and i’m one horrible day in mid-August, they mixed”

possible there's some destructive interference in there

In our case the other smell is the sugar beet plant

There's also the celery. I drove through a valley in western Michigan right after the celery harvest, and the smell was overpowering.

Worse than a paper mill?

Wow, paper mills are so bad. Now I want to smell these pickle vats to compare.

Good read though. I love pickles, had no idea they all come from Michigan.

Ahem, not all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Olive_Pickle_Company

(And that’s not even counting the dozen jars in our pantry that my wife made from the cucumbers she grew in her garden out back!)

Lol I was being facetious. As a North Carolina native, I have eaten my fair share of Mt. Olives! Great pickles! Homemade are the best for sure. I have a couple raised beds at a local comunity garden, I am planning on making my own this year as well! Can't wait!

well, differently awful.

i've never been close enough to a tannery to know, but that's historically one of the professions that gets kicked out downwind of towns very quickly.

I buy pickles at an Asian supermarket, they generally come from Pakistan.

Indian-made pickles are surprisingly common these days, and quite good as well, particularly given that Western-style pickles have very little in common with Indian ones.

General grumble: the way this article (and the US) conflate "pickle" with "cucumber pickled in vinegar", even though there's an actual "PickleVerse" of all sorts of other pickled foods out there.

I'd assume another advantage of Michigan is the cheap bargeable salt available from salt caverns all around the great lakes.

(Or the streets, or the undercarriages of the cars...)

There are salt mines under both Detroit and in Windsor it's sister city across the river in Canada.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_salt_mine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Salt_Mine

I never know which are food-grade salt and which are road-grade salt.

I know it’s the same salt, but I figure only some maintain food standards.

Well, at least the Windsor mine produces or at some point produced both kinds, and so do a number of other mines (most operated by Sifto, IIRC). The salt that goes on our roads and walkways for safety in southern Ontario AFAIK comes from the Windsor mine, and so does or did some of the edible salt (though I think these days Sifto sells a lot more of the table salt than Windsor, I remember growing up with Windsor branded salt).

There are some of what are called solution mines in Northern Michigan that produce nothing but table salt. In solution mining they introduce water under pressure down wells to melt the salt and then retrieve it on the surface where the salt is separated out. My late father used to work for Morton Salt so I got a bit of an education ;<).

Who else came here to hear about Pickle Rick?

I never really consider where cucumbers and in turn pickles came from.

the_more_you_know_star.gif

I knew this, but had a harsh realization once. I was moving out of a place, and flushing down the things that were flushable to save garbage runs.

One such thing was a jar of mini-pickles. The next day, I realized why that was a problem. They probably rehydrated in the pipes back to their originalish size. That toilet didn't flush properly again for a while.

The flushing of pickles down your toilet was probably going to cause problems before any rehydration concerns.

These weren't big ones... to start.

They’re also food waste that should go in the trash, not into the waste treatment system.

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