Snack Club: Dill Pickle + Almond
One of my all-time favorite sketches from Key & Peele is “Gremlins 2 Brainstorm.” You should just watch the whole thing, because it’s a masterpiece, but in it, a ‘sequel doctor‘ comes in to instruct the Gremlins writers’ to imagine new Gremlin characters. Around 3:07, one of the writers suggests, “Um, Electricity Gremlin?” To which Star Magic Jackson replies, “You just said noun and gremlin, like you playing Mad Libs…you haphazardly came up with a gremlin that’s just made out of bolts and is zig-zagging all over the room and is done completely in animation…and your idea’s in the movie! Done. Next.”
I think about Electricity Gremlin a lot, and the idea of noun + noun = new idea. I feel like a similar process was used in the creation of my newest favorite snack: Dill Pickle Almonds.
My first experience with a dill pickle flavored snack was Kettle Brand’s Dill Pickle potato chips. I happened upon them at a grocery store on my way to a friend’s barbecue. I paused, and looked at them long enough for my dad’s let’s-try-a-new-product-catch-phrase to pop into my head: “Something different.” After all, I love pickles, and I love chips, and I’ve eaten them in the same meal many times. A deli sandwich, wrapped in white paper, potato chips in the sandwich, the pickle soaking through its wrapping paper and turning it semi-translucent – this is what great lunches are made of. Some of the pickle juice gets on the potato chips, and suddenly you’ve got an American version of the English classic, chips (fries) and vinegar.
So putting the dill pickle flavor right in the chip? That’s just efficiency! I brought the Kettle Dill Pickle chips to the barbecue, and they were a hit. I mean, I ate most of them, but I remember some other friends enjoyed them, too. I’ve gotten them many times since.
But a few weeks ago, I was at a Whole Foods in Pasadena, doing my usual juggling act of reading my grocery list, trying to remember what I forgot to put on the list, and fielding multiple phone calls from my wife Lindsey as she added things to the list (one call per item). Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I saw it. A generic white bag from the Whole Foods private label, 365, nondescript but for the noun combination printed on it. Dill Pickle Almonds weren’t on my grocery list. They weren’t even in my imagination. But I couldn’t resist. “Something different,” I whispered, victorious, and took them home.
Reader, they are as delicious as they are unnatural.
Why almonds?!? I don’t see what dill pickles have to do with them. Can anything just be anything now? And I find myself answering, immediately: God, I hope so.
As I write this, I'm munching from the third bag I’ve gotten since that initial encounter. I keep having to pause from my typing so I can clean the dill pickle flavored powder off my fingers, then type a little more, then go back in again. As any good snacker knows, snacks that leave powder on your fingers are a special, exalted snack category.
Okay, back from cleaning my fingers off once more. While I was gone, I started wondering about the technique used to get flavored powder onto nuts, so I did a little digging, and found this YouTube video demonstrating an electrostatic coating system. In the video, they used cashews, and lo and behold, the cashews were being coated with…dill pickle seasoning. Noun + noun = dill pickle cashews. I guess I know I have to try next.
Let me know if you have had a dill pickle almond, or dill-pickle-anything-else! Or if you go and get some, let me know what you think. Also, while I was thinking about this newsletter but not actually writing it, I made a logo for Snack Club (see below). I’m thinking of making myself a Snack Club t-shirt. Or maybe a tote bag. If you find you’d also like one, please let me know! Leave a comment on this post.
In other news:
My podcast Partners has just returned for its second season. The first episode came out today, and it features Lin-Manuel Miranda & Thomas Kail telling the story of their twenty-year relationship as composer & director, as collaborators, and as friends. New episodes will be coming out weekly. Here's the trailer. You can also go back and listen to Season 1, if you missed it when it premiered in 2020.
Next month, I’ll be on tour playing concerts on the west coast with my dear friend Jenny Owen Youngs. We had such a wonderful time at SXSW and at our shows on the east coast. I hope you’ll be able to make it to one of these dates:
Sun May 8 - Seattle, WA - Neptune Theatre
Mon May 9 - Portland, OR - Polaris
Wed May 11 - San Francisco, CA - Independent
Tue May 17 - Los Angeles CA - Lodge Room
— Hrishikesh
PS: here’s everything else that I’m up to.