Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Food & Drink

Try a Pickle—Bamboo Style

Marla Milling
By

bamboo pickles
“They are treated like a pickle, only they are different,” Carla Squires says with a quick laugh.

She’s referring to the pickles her family has been making for decades in Wilkes County, N.C., but instead of cucumbers they use new bamboo shoots to create rings of tart, crisp pickles.

Related Videos

“They can be addictive,” says Squires. “Some people can eat a whole jar in 15 minutes. If you are a pickle person or like spicy things, you’re going to love them. They are a dill garlic pickle and very crisp and crunchy. If you bite into a cucumber pickle, it gets a bit soft, but the bamboo pickles stay crisp all the way through.” 

The Bamboo Pickles won Cooking Light Magazine’s Taste Test Award in 2010. Squires says some restaurants order them to put in their Bloody Marys and Martinis. They are also tasty fried into pickle chips, chopped on salads or layered on top of a burger.

After Squires’ grandmother died, she realized if anyone was going to carry on the family tradition of making the pickles, it was her. She learned techniques from her 79-year-old mother, who still makes them, and increased her knowledge by taking classes in food science at N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C.

She prepares the pickles in a commercial kitchen, but production is limited to once a year.

“I can only make them when the new bamboo shoots grow in May,” explains Squires. This window of time lasts for about four to six weeks.

She goes into the bamboo field with a machete and cuts the stalks, shucks and slices them and then gets them into a commercial kitchen within 24 hours to get them processed and pickled. The output has been up to 2,500 jars in a season, but with the popularity of the pickles the inventory quickly runs low until it sells out.

Bamboo pickles are sold at specialty stores in N.C. and through the website. 

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Pizza Hut brought back an iconic item for March Madness — but you can’t eat it
Be still our nostalgic 90s hearts with this Pizza Hut throwback
pizza hut brings back mini basketballs for march madness 06 satx 027

The 90s have been back for a while now. In fashion, in music, and even in our favorite snack foods. Everywhere you turn, there's a TikTok or YouTube video titled "You might be a 90s kid if..." Grocery store shelves can hardly stay stocked with old-school cool snacks like Waffle Crisp and Dunkaroos, and we millennials couldn't be more ecstatic about it.

Now, Pizza Hut has jumped on the nostalgic bandwagon as well. Coming in hot just after their re-release of 1990s favorite, The Big New Yorker, is another classic Pizza Hut throwback — mini basketballs. Participating restaurants will be selling their 2023 version of mini basketballs starting March 14, just in time for March Madness. The balls feature Pizza Hut's popular catchphrase, "No One Out Pizzas The Hut," in the restaurant's signature red and black color scheme. The cost of revisiting one of your favorite childhood memories will set you back just $7.

Read more
Expert pitmasters reveal their top tips to make smoked brisket
Expert pitmasters shows us how to make smoked brisket
hill country barbecue market brisket 3

No one can argue that smoked meat is one of the great joys in life. If someone does, immediately unfriend them — they are not worthy of your time. Kidding, but only kind of. And while we love all pieces of smoked meat, from sausages to ribs and beyond, there’s something truly special about biting into a perfect piece of brisket, with its pink smoke ring, flavorful bark, and juicy meat that is just the right texture. While we’ve cooked many briskets in the oven in our day, smoked brisket is a much bigger undertaking, especially if you’re new to the backyard barbecue game.

New York City barbecue has been coming into its own during the past decade, which can be seen in the city’s many meaty festivals that take place every year. (Don't believe us? Check out this episode of Beards, Booze, and Bacon with Arrogant Swine's Tyson Ho.) One such event, Brisket King NYC, which has been going on for over ten years and draws pitmasters from near and far to compete for the best brisket in the city. This year, top pitmasters will be throwing down for the title on April 26, 2023, in what is sure to be a meat-tastic day.

Read more
Bubbly? Full-bodied and red? Zesty and white? Your favorite wine types, explained
All the primary types of wine (and everything you need to know about them)
Glasses of different kinds of wine

Trying to understand everything about wine all at once is an impossible endeavor. Wine is a beautifully complicated, ever-changing quiddity, and even the most decorated and prestigious wine experts in the world often find themselves confounded by its constant little surprises.
That isn't to say that, if you care to, you shouldn't become educated on the subject of wine. It's a hobby and a passion that's tremendously fun to pursue, and there's much to learn on the matter.
If you find yourself in the beginning stages of your wine education, just as in everything, you'll want to start with the basics. It's possible that up until now, you haven't put much thought into the several different kinds of wine there are, except for, say, red and white. But while there are obviously exceptions within every hard and fast rule, for the most part, wine can be broken down into roughly nine categories. Here we'll take a minute to break those categories down, explain what they mean, which wines fall into them, and, our favorite - how to drink those wines.

Sparkling wine

Read more