“ Hey, you’ re the pickle lady!”
In a full-length lime green jumpsuit with matching pickle earrings, Meredeth Humphreys definitely looked the part and it isn’ t hard to see how she’ d receive that greeting at vendor shows across the Black Hills, where she and her husband, Jeff Fickling, sell their briny, pickled wares.
Maybe you don’ t consider yourself a pickle connoisseur, but Fick’ s Picks Brinery has something for everyone: sweet, spicy, zesty, bold, adventurous, classic, there’ s something for everyone to enjoy, made from high quality, fresh ingredients, canned locally, and sold at the Custer Beacon and at regional vendor markets.
While we visited, Jeff heated a skillet on the stove and preheated the oven. He was wearing a shirt that said: Never. Enough. Pickles. In a few minutes, fish was sizzling, generously seasoned with Mere’ s Mix, Meredeth’ s all-purpose blend of spices like paprika, cayenne, celery salt, with a hint of sweet. The aroma was mouth-watering.
Their journey to becoming the“ pickle people” didn’ t start with pickles, but with the food industry more generally, Meredeth said.“ Jeff and I have been in the food and hospitality industry our entire lives. My parents owned a restaurant and both of us have been in pretty much any and all aspects of food and hospitality – Restaurants, hotels, fast food, dive bars. Our most extensive experience is in high-end off-premise catering, which is where we met. We lived in Denver for about 10 years, working for one of the nation’ s largest catering companies, and we got to the point where the grind was too much and we wanted to slow things down.
We ended up putting our house up for sale, paid off all of our debt, bought an RV and hit the road. We travelled for about 4 years full time …. Anywhere we went, we relied on our food and beverage and hospitality background to pay the bills. The first summer we came here, we found the Custer Beacon and worked there.” That was in 2020, and they became friends with the owner, coming back the next year as well, and purchased a house.
“ We discovered Custer and the Black Hills is a very supportive community of small and local businesses, and along with the cottage food law of South Dakota it allows us to work out of our home and sell pickled goods.”
The idea to start a pickle company has been percolating – brining? – for a number of years. The“ Fick’ s Picks” name was first put on a jar for a bride whose wedding Jeff was catering, as a sort of wedding gift when he found out she, too, was a pickle lover.“ I called it Fick’ s Picks, because I needed a name and it
Jeff and Meredeth, the pickle masterminds behind Fick’ s Picks
rhymed.” It was a one-off thing, he said, or so it seemed, because the idea was persistent.“ It has kind of been percolating ever since.”
Not until the beginning of last year was everything in place to be able to get the idea off the ground.
“ It started with homemade goods we would give our friends,” Meredeth said,“ and our friends said,‘ Hey, you have a really good product, you should do something with it!’” So, they looked into South Dakota’ s cottage food laws, took a food preservation class through the SDSU extension office and“ That kind of sealed the deal,” Jeff said.
While the fish fried and sizzled, Jeff toasted some corn tostada shells, and Meredeth wedged a lime. She minced a green apple and mixed some into the purple cabbage slaw. This recipe is a favorite of theirs, and gets rave reviews from their friends.
“ It started more out of the love for cooking and designing recipes and experimenting,” Jeff said.“ The pickles we’ re putting in the jars today are not the first version of the recipes we started with …. I went out and bought a bunch of books on canning and pickling and some of those tested recipes haven’ t changed in 100 years. The process hasn’ t changed, the ingredients haven’ t changed. Most of those recipes are kind of old fashioned, what you would expect people were making 100 years ago when this was a true food preservation technique; they did it because they wanted to eat food in the winter when they couldn’ t grow fresh vegetables. Now we can play with the flavors, and people are a lot more experimental with spices.” myblackshillscountry. com Down Country Roads
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