Texas Taste Test: Texas Sassy Pickle Sauce
Everything's grosser in Texas
Article Tools
Every week or so, our colleagues at The A.V. Club hold a Taste Test, in which they sample various cuisines with a focus on the new, the novel, and the downright bizarre. But why should Chicago have all the fun? Texas, after all, has no shortage of its own fascinating food and drink, just as enticing and/or disgusting as anything you’ll find on the shores of Lake Michigan. Every so often Decider presents the Texas Taste Test, wherein we shovel various Lone Star finds down our gullets. If you have suggestions for stuff you'd like to see us eat or drink for your amusement, e-mail us.
This week: Texas Sassy Pickle Sauce
The first thing that comes to mind when you bring up Texas cooking to non-natives is usually Tex-Mex. If they’re a little more educated, they may think barbecue, salsa, or even kolaches. But what you’re not likely to understand if you haven’t spent a lot of time in Texas is our insatiable love for pickling. Basically, if it can be crammed into a Mason jar and immersed in spicy brine, Texans will go gaga for it. Our love for peppers, vegetables, and probably wood chips that have been pickled beyond recognition is practically Japanese in its obsessiveness.
Even stranger, though, is our passion for pickle juice. Pickling brine isn’t usually thought of as a foodstuff in and of itself; it’s basically a by-product of the process, something no sane person would think of consuming on its own. (But then again, no sane person would come up with tearing the skin from a pig and deep-frying it, and yet ... chicharrones.) As with our farm animals, Texans believe in using every part of the pickle, and that’s where Texas Sassy Pickle Sauce comes in. The Austin-based company bottles a blend of herbs, spices, hot peppers, and pickle brine that, according to its makers, has “a million and one uses.”
Our crack tasting team got hold of a case of the stuff recently and tried approximately 300,000 of those “million and one uses.” The easiest—and least offensive—was as a marinade: We brewed up some brisket using Pickle Sauce and found that it imparted a slightly sweet, spicy flavor if we left it in the brine overnight. Used as a more straightforward sauce, it was also great—provided you like things incredibly salty. It’s designed to give everything a sweet-and-sour quality, plus the spiciness hardcore Texans demand even from their milk, but the dominating flavor here is pure sodium chloride. Cooking with it gives everything an overwhelmingly salty tang, while just leaving it in your refrigerator overnight without proper covering results in a rather funky odor getting into whatever else you have in there.
Finding ourselves slightly bored, we decided to move on to the most interesting part of the company’s website: Using Pickle Sauce in alcoholic beverages. A few of these worked out all right—the “Carolyn’s Evil Bloody Mary” was a winner, with the salty, tangy flavor enhancing the tomato and Worcestershire sauce—but most were disasters. The “Killer Martini” took the worst elements of the dirty martini and worsened them significantly; “Jim’s Sassy Tequila Sunrise” (a blend of tequila, Pickle Sauce, and—gag—Big Red) was like an even more rancid version of Rusty Venture’s Red Mocho Cooler. And whoever had the idea to introduce pickle juice to a Screwdriver is a sick individual who should be in prison.
We decided to finish by doing what we used to do with pickle juice in fifth grade to gross out our friends, i.e. drink it straight from the bottle. (In our defense, we were pretty drunk by then.) As you’d expect, the result was nasty—and perhaps even worse, because regular pickle brine doesn’t have hot pepper in it—but still, it was no worse than the Texas Sassy Screwdriver. (Being stabbed to death by an actual Screwdriver would be no worse than the Texas Sassy Screwdriver.) In summation, we can’t really imagine why anyone would want this stuff, but it’s currently sold out. As so often happens around here when it comes to things Texans love, we find ourselves once more in the minority.
Reactions:
- “The brisket was great, but it fails notably as a dipping sauce. It might not be bad over fried fish, though.”
- “I don’t know who ‘Carolyn’ is, but she’s an evil genius. This stuff was made to go into Bloody Marys.”
- “Ugh, it’s so bad mixed with orange juice. Bad idea. Bad, bad, idea.”
- “There are not many things that have made me want to instantly throw up, but this Screwdriver...”
- “The last time I drank something like this straight, I was 11 and it was on a dare.”
Where to get it: Almost anywhere in Austin: H.E.B., Central Market, and Whole Foods, to name but a few.
