Pickle this, Mr. Redzepi

From the great and towering library of types of guys, let us today de-shelve the “hipster who makes his own pickles.”

By the twilight of the aughts, you’d hear about this type of guy all the time. He made lactofermented cauliflower in a Williamsburg loft. He wore suspenders. He insisted on making pour-overs to sip while tapping at his MacBook. He was obsessed with kimchi. He had a horrid mustache.

This type of guy fell out of the popular vocabulary along with “fusion” as an adjective for cuisines. The zeitgeist subsumed both concepts; fusion food became “authentic to the chef’s lived experience,” then just “food.”

The hipster pickle guy ascended at the altar of Rene Redzepi, whose congregants — the international dinerati — were baptized in the garums emerging from David Zilber’s Noma Fermentation Lab.

The Williamsburg loft the “hipster pickle guy” once fumigated with American Spirit Yellows was developed, and the SVA-educated Pentagram designer who moved in bought a copy of New York Times bestseller and “one of the Best Cookbooks of the Year,” The Noma Guide to Fermentation, after spotting the orange spine on several too-high-to-be-used shelves at restaurants surrounding his new apartment.

You can now buy kimchi in grocery stores across America. Seth Rogen made an airplane movie about being pickled. Pickle Rick still haunts the memeosphere.

For sure, the pickled cucumber is still “Pickle” on the American palate, but “pickle” is now an entry-level (but essential) vocab word for gourmands-in-waiting the country over, and 23-year-old boys in every regional city will, on second dates this very evening, seek to impress their dates by ordering the tsukemono.

I’ll say this: you should make pickled red onions. Regular readers (love you) will recall I mentioned making these in the previous edition of this newsletter.

As far as pickle-making goes, you could do a lot worse. It’s a humble and practical fridge staple.

Take a red onion. Trim the tuft. Cut it in half (pole to pole; you’re cutting on the root and tuft ends). Place one of the halves on your cutting board, grip claw-style, and slice thin strips as uniformly as possible. Repeat with second half. Place onions in a glass or metal container. If you like, add a whole jalapeño (roughly chopped).

Heat vinegar (white or red wine, really any kind), water, and sugar (1:1:1 ratio, enough to cover the onions in your container), stirring until combined and steaming but not quite simmering. I like to add black peppercorns, cloves, and allspice. You can use less sugar if you like.

Pour the steaming liquid over the onions and press down. Don’t be alarmed if the onions are not quite covered; they’ll release liquid.

Within an hour, you’ll have pickled red onions. They’ll keep in your fridge far longer than it will ever take you to eat them.

You can also slice an onion, put all the bits in a jar, cover with vinegar, and wait a day or so, but why not live a little?