Real Pickles

Northeast Grown, 100% organic, fermented & raw pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, kvass, and hot sauce

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The Scoop on our New Turmeric Kraut!

This guest post is written by our friend Brittany Wood Nickerson, a well-respected herbalist and health educator with a background in Western, Ayurvedic and Chinese herbal medicine. Her treatment and teaching approach emphasize personal empowerment, preventative home healthcare and whole body wellness. Brittany is the founder and primary instructor at Thyme Herbal in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches a three year Herbal Apprenticeship Program. She teaches women’s health at the University of Massachusetts and is the organizer of the Northampton/Amherst Herbal Meet-up group. Brittany is the author of The Everyday Living Series, The Herbal Homestead Journal and her newest work: Recipes From the Herbalist’s Kitchen, to be published by Storey in Spring 2017!  

I first met my fiancé, Casey Steinberg, when buying salad greens at his Old Friends Farm stand at the Amherst Farmer’s Market.  He was handsome, and his greens were really good!  In the fall they had bountiful baskets of fresh ginger and turmeric – I had never seen anything like it!  Casey and his business partner, Missy Bahret, pioneered growing ginger in northern climates in 2004.  A few years later they began growing turmeric and now, almost a decade later, this practice has caught on.  Today, Old Friends Farm gets regular inquiries about growing ginger from farmers in locations ranging from California to Vermont, and Costa Rica to Germany.

It is important to include medicinal herbs in our efforts to forge a vibrant local and regional food system.  Culinary traditions are based on ancient wisdom.  Cooking with herbs and spices makes food easier to digest and kills bacteria associated with food borne illnesses.  You might put basil on your pasta or cumin in your curry because it tastes good, but these practices have been passed on by generations of cooks who seasoned food with herbs because it was practical, necessary and healthful.

The caraway seeds found in many traditional sauerkraut recipes are a perfect example.  Cabbage can cause gas and bloating, but caraway seeds make the cabbage easier to digest and help reduce gas.  Traditional spices, such as the black pepper and dill in pickles, help warm and balance the cold energy of cucumbers.  Once you understand these principles you start to see them everywhere and you can make up your own traditions.  Excellent examples from the Real Pickles’ collection include: Red Cabbage with thyme, winter savory and marjoram; Beets with rosemary and onion; Ginger Carrots; and their new, absolutely fabulous Turmeric Kraut!

Turmeric root freshly harvested

Turmeric is a powerful medicinal herb, traditionally used in cooking and medicinal preparations.  It is a mildly warming, aromatic, bitter digestive aid.  It stimulates liver function and the release of bile, which helps with the digestion of fats and oils.  It improves the breakdown and absorption of nutrients and relieves gas and bloating.  Turmeric supports digestive metabolism, liver metabolism, and cellular metabolism, which aids in detoxification and helps to relieve inflammation.

Holistic health sees the health of each part of a system being integrally connected to the health of the whole.  In the body, holistic health starts with good digestion.  If digestion is compromised, all other systems become compromised.  A well functioning digestive system allows us to absorb the most nutrients from our food and to expel waste effectively.  Our digestive system is also closely tied to the nervous system.  The enteric nervous system, which governs digestion, has almost as many neurons as the brain!  It connects the digestive system to all other systems in the body.  Aromatic culinary herbs help relax the GI tract and calm the nervous system, while at the same time relieving many digestive upsets.

Real Pickles Organic Turmeric Kraut
Real Pickles Organic Turmeric Kraut

Fermentation, like cooking with culinary herbs, makes food easier to digest. Fermented vegetables also contain beneficial bacteria, which have been shown to improve skin health, decrease allergies, and increase immunity (see Real Pickles’ health page for more info).  Lactic acid, produced during the fermentation process, makes fermented foods taste sour – hence the name sauerkraut.  As if everything we have learned so far isn’t enough, the sour flavor is also great for digestion!  Sour tasting foods stimulate the secretion of acids and enzymes, as well as bile from the liver and gall bladder.  The probiotics and sour flavor of kraut combined with the bitter, aromatic and mildly warming energy of turmeric are a perfect recipe for holistic wellness.  The benefits complement one another, improve digestion and help to support whole system balance.

As organisms in a larger system, our holistic wellness is dependent on many interconnected systems: environmental, economic, social and cultural.  Efforts to restore local and regional food systems and economies understand this kind of holism, recognizing that our food is only as healthy as the system from which it comes.  Real Pickles’ commitment to producing healthy food and creating a sound regional food system is a role model for the planet.  We need more businesses willing to think outside the box and be structurally creative – committing to policies that support workers, distributors, retailers, consumers and the environment in ways that foster health on all levels.

Years after we met, I was teaching Casey how to make sauerkraut in our home kitchen, and he said, “let’s add turmeric!”  It was harvest season, and we had fresh turmeric coming out our ears!  We were very excited to share our first batch with Real Pickles.  Cabbage and turmeric have not traditionally been grown in the same climate, which is part of what makes this product so special and unique.  Real Pickles and Old Friends Farm have created a special partnership which builds on each other’s innovations and shared mission to work toward a thriving local and regional food system.  This is health as it should be – interconnected, responsible and delicious.

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Tips From Pickle Fanatics


While Winter tends to be a quiet time of year for making pickles, it is undeniably a great time for eating them. Fresh local produce is harder to come by and the tangy flavor of fermented foods is a perfect accompaniment to hearty cold weather fare. When it comes to fermented vegetables, the Real Pickles staff are, as you may have guessed, enthusiastic and creative users of the stuff. I talked with some other members of our staff recently to get a sense of how they are incorporating Real Pickles into their meals.

Katie, our fermentation specialist, has been on a tempeh reuben kick.  Known to us all as an excellent cook, she melts some Swiss cheese on rye bread, adds some slices of Rhapsody’s tasty tempeh, and tops it with Organic Garlic Kraut and Thousand Island dressing (she makes her own by combining ketchup, mayo and a chopped pickle).  “It’s an easy sandwich that you can make in a frying pan or a toaster oven,” she notes.

Apples and sauerkraut are a popular combination among staff, especially in these colder months. Some thinly sliced raw cabbage, Organic Sauerkraut, chopped apple, feta and toasted walnuts tossed in a creamy dressing is a perfect crunchy winter salad. Another inspired example of this combination is the pizza that Dan and Addie have been making, topped with ricotta, gruyere, shallots, thinly sliced apple and Organic Garlic Kraut. Dan and Addie particularly like using the sourdough crusts from our friends at Berkshire Mountain Bakery. We are always impressed by the beautiful caramelized shallots when they bring in leftovers for lunch.

In my own home, we make a version of the Real Pickles vegetable fried rice recipe at least a couple of times a month. We start by sautéeing lots of garlic, add some leftover rice, crack in an egg or two and then add whatever cooked vegetables we have around (carrots, kale and broccoli are always good). Sometimes we’ll throw in some frozen peas or green beans from our summer garden. We top it all with a big serving of Organic Asian-style Cabbage and some sesame oil. A handful of chopped salted peanuts tossed on top are an added bonus.

Brendan, who works in the kitchen and is our source of outstanding homemade goat cheese, also makes a lot of stir fries and likes to add in some Organic Ginger Carrots at the very end, heating just enough to warm it all through. He also suggests mixing the carrots into green salads.

Fermented foods are popular with staff for breakfast, especially as an accompaniment to eggs. A slug or two of Organic Tomatillo Hot Sauce on scrambled eggs has long been our favorite use for it. Annie, our lead production manager, likes to cover an over-medium egg with melted cheddar cheese and Organic Red Cabbage. Hannah also likes to precede her day in the Real Pickles kitchen with fried eggs for breakfast, topping hers with Organic Asian-style Cabbage.

If you’ve had a busy week and are looking for a simple and satisfying meal, you can always take a cue from the Real Pickles lunch table: unwrap a wedge of cheese, get some crusty bread or crackers and top it off with whatever Real Pickles vegetables you have open. Joe, our facility manager, takes this simplicity approach a step further. He traveled back home to Louisville over the holidays and his stash of Organic Dill Pickles intended for family and friends became the road trip snack of choice. “We easily went through an entire jar of pickles in one sitting and drank the brine when they were gone.”

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Occupy Wall Street and Organic Pickles

In lower Manhattan and in cities and towns across the country, thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand change.  We are the 99%, they are saying, here to put an end to the societal injustices perpetuated by the 1%.  Those occupying Wall Street and elsewhere are speaking out against the concentration of corporate power and its negative impact on people and ecosystems, including problems ranging from joblessness and lack of access to health care to loss of biodiversity and accelerating climate change.

Meanwhile, in western Massachusetts, a small crew is hard at work inside a solar-powered food processing facility, peeling and shredding cabbages freshly harvested from an organic farm ten miles away.  The cabbage will ferment for several months, and then be sold as raw sauerkraut to stores around the Northeast.

Occupying the streets.  Making organic pickles.  Any connection here?  I would say so.

At first glance, what happens here at Real Pickles appears to be merely ordinary business activity.  Just a small enterprise trying to yield a reasonable profit by producing food for people.  An observer not so familiar with the workings of contemporary America might be tempted to think it normal, as well, that we source our vegetables from a small organic farm down the road, generate our own power, sell our pickles in raw and fermented form, and only distribute within our own region.  But of course, in 2011 here in the United States, there is nothing ordinary at all about such practices.  Nor is it typical these days for people to be eating food produced by a small business.

While the representatives of the 99% are seeking to occupy Wall Street, we should probably be thinking of the 1% as the real occupiers.  Climate activist Bill McKibben, in a recent address to the demonstrators in NYC, noted: “Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere.  That’s why we can never do anything about global warming.  Exxon gets in the way.  Goldman Sachs gets in the way.”  Indeed, Wall Street has long been occupying many realms of our lives.  And our food system is a prime example.

Local food production and distribution by small businesses certainly used to be the norm.  But these days, our food system is primarily national and international in scale.  It is dominated by huge corporations with massive influence over what we eat and how it is grown, processed, distributed, and sold.  These companies have spent significant sums of money to convince us that there is nothing wrong with this picture.  Monsanto’s public relations message is that we need them if we are to “feed the world”.  Kraft Foods assures us that they’re there for us, “fighting hunger and encouraging healthy lifestyles”.

Increasingly, however, people are starting to see through the slick PR campaigns.  They are starting to see connections between the corporate control of our food system and a wide variety of societal problems – the diabetes and obesity epidemics, the huge “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, just to name a few. Indeed, I think the evidence is robust and convincing enough to say quite clearly:  A global, corporate-dominated food system has profoundly negative consequences for people and ecosystems.  We are, without a doubt, in need of a new food system.

Here, then, lies the connection between Occupy Wall Street and a business such as Real Pickles.  Among the Wall Street protesters, some are more radical than others in their demands for change.  But there appears, by and large, to be a unified determination to alter the balance of power in our society away from the corporate elite and in favor of the 99%, and thereby begin to remedy a long list of social and ecological problems.

At Real Pickles, we are doing essentially the same work.  Having recognized that a corporate-dominated food system does not serve our society well, we have set about helping to build a new one.  Real Pickles is small, people-centered, ecologically-conscious, and local/regional in scale; and puts out food that is authentic and nourishing.  The aim is that this business will serve as a model as our new and better food system emerges.  Just like those protesting on Wall Street, we also recognize that the problems stemming from corporate control extend far beyond the food system, and hope that our work has impact as part of a broader re-shaping of our society, as well.

Occupy Wall Street and Real Pickles represent different approaches to the same effort.  Many approaches are needed, as there is much work to be done and no one simple path to an equitable and sustainable society.  So, it is with excitement that we witness the latest social ferment on the streets.  Here at Real Pickles we love fermentation!  We fully support the Occupy Wall Street protests and are delighted to be engaged together in the work for a better world.

 

Header photo: David Shankbone