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Until fairly recently, the jars of pickles many of us came into contact with most were the gigantic ones on the counter at the chippy, afloat with whole boiled eggs like specimens in formaldehyde. Or the gherkins in a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder.
But things are changing – Britain is cottoning on to a culinary tradition that deliciously fuels large swathes of Eastern Europe and Asia. So it’s not just fancy delis and farmers’ markets stacked with artisan kimchis and sauerkrauts now, but supermarkets too. Nick Vadasz, aka The Picklesman, the founder of Vadasz Pickles and Ferments, has run the gamut, from starting his street food pickle outfit in a shipping container, to launching his ferments in grocery stores.
“I always wanted for people to enjoy our products beyond the middle class foodies that go to farmers’ markets, of which I am one,” he says wryly. “But the fact we’re in Tesco now and Morrisons is brilliant. I love it, because it means everyone can go and try kimchi or sauerkraut.”
You can also now make his pickles at home. His debut cookbook, The Pickle Jar, explains the basics of pickling and fermentation, before showing how to use them in meals – from chicken salad with fermented celery, to pea and pickle soup – rather than just “sticking them in a sandwich”.
Vadasz personally doesn’t go a day without eating kimchi – a spicy Korean fermented cabbage that the 59-year-old pairs with everything, from savoury pancakes and shepherd’s pie, to his mum’s crispy cauliflower “surprise” (“The surprise was it had a can of Heinz beans in the bottom. That is creativity!”).
“I don’t think I could live without kimchi,” he says, matter-of-factly. After all, pickles and ferments are a very serious business, in both his day-to-day eating habits, and the very fabric of his family’s history. Vadasz’s Hungarian grandmother taught him to make the first pickle he “fell in love with”, a fresh cucumber pickle that is, of course, in the book. “Gran was a big part of our family, very loving, but her family suffered a lot during the Second World War and when 1956 came around, and the Russians invaded Hungary, they’d had enough by then and wanted to get out,” he says. “She came across [to Britain] and travelled with a jar of pickles, apparently.
“This story of them having something to sustain them on their journey, it’s a good metaphor for times of strife. You grab the most important things and for them, it was a jar of good pickles – as well as a few other bits and pieces!” he adds with a laugh. While his grandmother passed on her cucumber pickle recipe, his death row food – “It’s so lovely. The smell of it reminds me of the summer and Granny, some fried chicken schnitzel with some creamed potatoes, fantastic” – it’s his father, a doctor, who actually taught him to cook.
“Food was what I had in common with my dad, we cooked together a lot or I’d just watch and learn,” he remembers. “Some of the dishes he cooked were family dishes we had a lot, like beef carbonara, but Hungarian food was the big thing. The ritual of stuffing peppers and getting the sauce that we simmered them in right, making sure it wasn’t too sweet, but was just right; that process of working together was such a special thing.
“I wasn’t very academic, so I was never going to become a doctor like him. I didn’t go to university, so I was a bit of a let-down in lots of ways. In fact, now he rubs his hands together in his old age and says how proud he is of what I’ve achieved, but it’s always a bit of a backhanded compliment!” he says self-deprecatingly. “In the end, I proved you don’t need to be academic to do things in life. Follow your passions and you can succeed in all sorts of ways.”
Vadasz began in professional kitchens and didn’t thrive on the pressure and stress, but learned a huge amount “about working hard”. He says the industry can very much be like it is in the hit series The Bear. “I had some pretty bad experiences in the kitchen, just from sheer pressure and hard work, so it can be that bad, but it can also be fantastic,” he says. “Anyone creative will tell you that the process is sometimes full of stress and worry and angst, but the final result is sometimes what counts.”
Selling his own pickles and ferments from that shipping container in 2011 was “full on” but came with less anxiety. “I miss the energy I had then,” he says and admits it was “difficult handing over the reins to a bigger company and not being involved so much.”
He sold the business in 2017 but is still very involved. “It was like falling off the edge of a cliff, actually, but I adjusted to it as we all do, and I’m not going to knock it. I must say, I now do what I’m best at, which is the creative stuff, the product development.”
So yes, you can just go and buy his pickles and skip the whole bit where you end up with jars and jars of your own sauerkraut and kimchi bubbling away on the windowsill, but where’s the fun in that? “I want people to think, ‘Oh, I can use this pickle for this,’ or, ‘I can use ferment for this,’” says Vadasz. “The book is a gateway for them to start using pickles, sour cream, kimchi, all sorts of ferments in all sorts of different ways, and to give them the confidence to experiment, to adapt things.”
He adds: “It’s about confidence, and to have the confidence to be a bit more creative, if they take that from it, then it’s been a success. I’m happy with that.”
‘The Pickle Jar’ by Nick Vadasz (Hamlyn, £20).
English (US) ·