Sweet or sour, pickling has power. And more Lexington restaurants want that punch.

If there was ever any doubt that pickles are having their moment it evaporated last year with the arrival of the pickle bouquet as a way to say “I love you” on Valentine’s Day.

While a national audience was introduced to the idea on the Today Show last January, chefs and other food fanciers in the Bluegrass have been feeling pickle love for a while now.

At the new East End Tap and Table there’s an appetizer plate of pickled vegetables that recently included mushrooms, turnips, onions, carrots, green beans and cauliflower, and other pickled items appear on menu items including lemongrass chicken banh mi and the East End Burger.

“We do them all from scratch,” said chef Aaron Sheets, who grew up in Northeast Kentucky, where “we kind of pickled everything in the fall to try to preserve it and make it through the winter.”

Down the street at West Main Crafting executive chef Greg Spaulding is also “absolutely, 100 percent” making all the pickled items that appear in dishes there, which like at East End includes a pickled vegetable appetizer plate. On the West Main menu pickled fennel is paired with Maine scallops while the Wagyu beef comes with bok choi and daikon kimchi that has been fermented for 30 days.

“We’ll pickle anything,” Spaulding said. Sometimes he’s pickling simply to avoid waste when there are surplus vegetables, other times he just thinks a vegetable looks great and wants to experiment, sometimes it’s to extend the season of a precious item like ramps — the rare and only-found-in-the-wild onion — which are available for about two weeks in the spring. He uses the green leaves fresh and pickles the white stems. That way, he said, “I can have ramps in December.”

Don’t expect vegetables that taste more or less the like bread and butter or dill pickled cucumbers found on every supermarket shelf. Both Sheets and Spaulding experiment with flavors and processes, using a variety of fresh herbs, vinegars and lemon juice to create new flavor profiles for the preserved vegetables.

Even though he’s “kind of a fire-head,” Sheets said “we didn’t do things spicy where I grew up.” But Betsy Borland, one of the owners of East End, is half Thai and has introduced some of the spicier approaches to pickling in that and other Asian cuisines.

“In Thai food you always try to balance the spicy with the sweet and the acidity … there is never just one flavor note,” she said. Pickled vegetables are often used as a taste counterpoint or a palate cleanser.

The only problem they’ve had with pickles at East End was early on when customers didn’t understand that the “house made pickles” weren’t a plate of traditional pickled cucumbers or a fried dill pickle. When they changed the menu to read “Housemade Pickled Vegetables,” it took off.

There’s science to back up pickled anything as a way to make not just your heart and your palate happy but also your gut. The Washington Post reported in January on recent research on “the outsize role beneficial microbes (which are bountiful in fermented foods) play in helping our gut, immune and overall health.”

While health benefits are a plus, the flavor and texture of pickled everything is what made pickles a top-of-the-menu item.

Sandra Bastin, professor of dietetics and human nutrition at the University of Kentucky, said the rise of interest in pickles and pickling is part of a general “renewed interest in food preservation at home,” although most home cooks limit their pickling adventures to salsas and traditional pickles. More adventurous restaurants, she said, “have been serving more pickled or fermented vegetables because they add color and spice to the plate.”

One of Spaulding’s favorite adventures was pickling heirloom cherry tomatoes. Tomatoes, he said, present a particular challenge because they can lose their shape and texture during the pickling process. But one day, “it just came to me while I was driving to work,” to try dehydrating them first. When they came out of the dehydrator there were “almost rock hard but very sweet” and he thought, “now, what am I going to do with this?” He put them in a dark place in a glass jar with white wine vinegar and “basically forgot about them for two months.”

What he found when he opened the jar were cherry tomatoes that “are super delicious,” as well as a “very unique white wine tomato vinegar,” that’s a great complement to Mediterranean dishes.

“Isn’t that fun, isn’t that fun?”

This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 12:42 PM.