A New Pickle With Gusto (and Garlic)
Rick Field of Rick’s Picks is known for transforming Greenmarket flora like ramps and garlic scapes into gourmet pickles, but his newest product, the People’s Pickle, is a brash homage to the brined cuke’s Lower East Side roots. After perpetual requests for a good old deli-style pickle, Field capitulated—and just in time. The launch of his new creation, available for $8 a 24-ounce jar at various Greenmarket locations, coincides with the closing of Guss’s, a culinary tragedy of full-sour proportions. Although Field achieves a proper garlic-and-dill flavor profile, his pickles aren’t loaded with salt, a major competitive advantage in this low-sodium age.
An Easier Pie
Ask any fruit-pie aficionado and he will tell you that the best crusts are made with lard, particularly leaf lard, the delectable white fat that surrounds the pig’s kidneys. That’s where Flying Pigs Farm comes in: Just in time to take advantage of August’s stone-fruit and berry bounty, co-owner Jennifer Small has concocted a frozen pie dough made with her own hogs’ leaf lard and sold ($12.50 for two discs) at her farm’s Greenmarket stand. Our somewhat rusty blueberry-pie-making test kitchen found the dough a breeze to work with, and the resulting crust deliciously tender and flaky. Technically, you might call this cheating. But considering that the lard comes from contented, heritage-breed pigs, the butter from Ronnybrook Dairy, and the flour from Vermont’s King Arthur Flour company, this is a prefab pie dough that both Julia Child and Michael Pollan could get behind.