Food Stuffs: Sour Apples – Viccuria Market

There is something about apples in a barrel. Something that says we can all get along. Unfortunately, the sour apple pickle at the Vicurria Market is the LAPD-meets-Rodney-King of pickles. It just doesn’t get along.

The first bite of this sour apple is not exactly traumatic, but somehow you instantly think of torture items thought up by the writers of Saturday Night Live. The first act would include being tied to a stretcher, forced to keep your mouth open and go through Oakley’s Car Wash ingesting the soap and suds and good old Oakley sweat.

Other types of sour apple torture could include: eating the chalked lines off a baseball field, attending a home-brewed vinegar party in the Appalachians, and being a participant on an extreme reality show called Lemonade Gone Wild! hosted by Lil’ Kim.

My second sampling of this pickle brought up slightly different images. The smell and taste brought to mind a big bag of Passover garbage with slightly spoiled Manischewitz mixing with the horseradish. Now that may be worth $2.19 a pound for some lucky pickle buyer, but I’ll stay on the sidelines.

A simpler reaction to this item is to just spit it out.

In fact, the car wash and other torturous sour apple pickle analogies are almost too generous. The aftertaste of this fermented concoction reminds me of really bad white wine. This reviewer imagined a wine made by his Great Uncle Shep on the roof of his Coney Island high rise using the finest white grapes available at Pathmark.

Uncle Shep could uncork this Luna Park Pinot Grigio made in a Ragu tomato sauce jar. It would have been full of bitterness and over acidity that formed during his process of fermentation. He would toast glasses, avoid the pigeon poop and talk about his work umpiring softball.

The sour apple pickle is a miss, and worth skipping. Save your hard earned pickle money for something a little more inviting, like a car wash!

Viccuria, 2275 86th Street, (718) 331-0100.

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