SoHo Park Pickles

Around lunchtime we had an interest in a light lunch, and ironically we found ourselves at SoHo Park, purveyor of many varieties of deep-fried potatoes and other vegetables, as well as a wide range of mayonnaise-based sauces.

While our son was only game for the fries, the adults opted to try something a little bit different and so we chose the fried pickles. Having enjoyed similarly named foods in the past, we were fully expecting deep-fried pickle chips (i.e. thin found cross sections of pickle possibly with ridges, as you would find in a jar of Vlasic hamburger dill chips).

Instead, what we received were pickle spears, and after trying these I have to say that it is an objective statement of fact that fried pickles are better made with chips than spears. The reasons are as follows:

• Chips provide a significantly higher surface-to-volume ratio than the equivalent mass of spears. For deep fried foods surface area equals fried batter, and so it goes without saying that increasing the crunchy outside to pickled cucumber inside ratio means better eating.
• The larger volume of pickle packs more liquid content, which likely means that it is much more difficult to drain, pat, or squeeze out enough moisture so that the outside will be dry enough to allow the batter to cling properly. Although the spears were clearly well cooked and the fried outside initially crispy, the batter easily flaked off because no matter how much moisture is driven out of the pickle surface, the thick spears still retain plenty inside which quickly rises back to the surface one the pickles start to cool, making the batter slough off in an unappealing manner.
• When served in the basket, the spears make for a much heavier, denser serving mass, easily packing efficiently into the available space. I think we probably had a whole jar of pickles in that one serving basket, which probably weighed a couple of pounds, and they were closely packed together which increased the tendency to get soggy and lose their coating. With fried foods it's much better if the individual pieces are small and oddly-shaped so that as they tumble into the serving container there is plenty of air space and overall the portion seems lighter and more airy.

By far the best part of the experience were the various sauces; both the fries and pickles came with two choices and so we were able to try a total of four. Of course, it's hard to go wrong with anything that's whipped into mayonnaise, but still we found the variety interesting, with the basil mayo being the best. We did try one non-mayonnaise choice, the spicy ketchup, which was also excellent.