Did you know that the brine used to make pickles is saltier than seawater? While this gives pickles their delicious taste, it also creates concerns about the water waste – the salt concentration in pickle brine exceeds the EPA’s maximum limit by about four orders of magnitude.
Most commercial vendors recycle their brine to reduce their waste, but this is only a short-term solution. Eventually, the brine loses enough salt in the pickling process to be unusable, but is still salty enough to be bad for the environment. And considering that a 2018 Forbes article reported that an estimated 245 million Americans will be consuming pickles by 2020, the salinity and environmental impact of pickle juice will become a growing concern.
Enter North Carolina State University-affiliated food scientist Erin McMurtrie and her colleagues. Based on a fermentation process proposed by another research team in 2010, they have now used a calcium chloride brine containing acetic acid (the same acid that is in vinegar) to pickle cucumbers. The resulting pickles had firm skin and high rates of sugar conversion to lactic acid, making them flavorful. The firm skin of these pickles was thanks to relatively low abundances of yeasts, molds, and bacteria, microbes which produce cucumber skin-softening enzymes during the traditional fermentation process.
Using this new brine, commercial retailers can completely eliminate sodium waste and cut the chloride in their fermentation broth by a fifth without sacrificing the flavor or quality of their pickled products. So rest easy, and enjoy a dill pickle – one made in a calcium brine, that is.