The perfect pickle
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Joel Mevissen is a pickle enthusiast who returned from time working in New York craving the wide variety and taste of the pickles he had enjoyed eating there.
He and an old friend, Calvin Lidden, had dabbled in pickling and brewing in the backyard when they were at school together and with a background in food they decided to do something more serious about it.
Joel’s inspiration was understandable, North Americans are the largest pickle consumers in the world. Pickles are commonly eaten as a side dish, along with a rising trend of deep-fried pickles covered in batter and the ‘stick pickle’ served at festivals, fairs or carnivals. There’s even a national pickle day every November.
The term pickle comes from the Dutch or German word pekel, meaning brine and pickling is the process where something is preserved using an acidic base, usually vinegar or brine.
Food can also be pickled by fermentation. Fermented food is conserved in a water and salt solution, or brine, in which they create their own acid, confusingly called lactic acid.
Most crunchy, watery vegetables can be pickled, but the one that most people are familiar with is the humble cucumber.
‘When I got back from the US,’ Joel explains, ‘we couldn’t find any Aussie pickles anywhere—they were all American or Indian.’
Pickle and pickle products vary with local taste and preferences. ‘We’ve found that Australians have a palette that is in-between sweet and really sour. I think we’ve found that balance which we call a sweet tang,’ Joel says.
‘We realised we’d hit upon a niche area that had no local product being made and that gave us the confidence to move forward with our idea,’ he says.
They must have known what they were doing because their business, Westmont Pickles, took off from there. ‘We started getting orders from a well-known premium butchery, so we had to get more professional with what we were doing.’
Put they hit a snag: they were buying their cucumbers at Sydney Markets, but it was hard to find the quantities they wanted, ‘Most farmers just grew cucumbers as an infill crop – and it was hard to get them when summer was over,’ Joel says.
‘Also, we were using just the standard variety Lebanese cucumbers, but I wasn’t happy with them because they had too many seeds. Australia only has the classic gherkins, but in the US they have so many varieties, you can buy pickling cucumbers at the produce store.’
Joel and Calvin soon found that to have the cucumbers they wanted to create the perfect pickle they had to find a farmer who was committed to cucumbers and who could supply them the variety they wanted.
It was a period of pickle research. ‘These last three years have been a huge learning curve for us,’ says Joel. ‘There was so much to discover, like how many seeds a variety of cucumber had, how thick the skin was to the crunch.’
Through a chance conversation with a member of his girlfriend’s family who had contacts in agriculture, they found a group of farmers looking for a project like the one they were embarking on. ‘We collaborated with them, sourcing seeds and trialling different varieties until the farmer went to the US and came back with one that worked.
‘The variety of cucumber we’re using likes a hot climate,’ Joel explains, so for year-round supply the cucumbers come from farms in different areas depending on the weather. ‘At the moment our cucumbers are coming from a farm in Bundaberg in Queensland, he says, then the supply will shift north to Townsville, then when it gets too hot there, the supply with shift south to Cowra in Central West New South Wales.’
Now that they’ve perfected their pickle supply, they’re looking at doing new things.
‘We’ve got pickle onions, a vinegar-based chilli juice and bloody mary juice coming out. We are even getting adventurous and doing a pickle using beer from Young Henrys,’ Joel says. ‘The other great thing about working so closely with our farmers is that as we plan new products and develop our recipes, we can get them to plant what we’ll want so in six months the crop will be ready for pickling.’
We support our farmers and they support us.
Joel doesn’t believe in marketing his pickles. ‘I say to people, just taste it. They really do sell themselves. We focus on quality and the product sells itself.’
For more about the perfect pickle, grab a copy of the Sprout Magazine Winter 2018 issue at your local stockist or online. Or never miss a story and subscribe.
Published at the beginning of each season, Sprout is a celebration of local food, producers and cuisine. It is about living sustainably through promoting fresh, seasonal produce from local farms and encouraging people to make a difference by growing their own food and making sustainable food choices.