In The Company Of A Pickling Queen
Text by Sophie Monks Kaufman
Photography by © JØrn Tomter
I was a super picky eater as a kid. Whenever I have dinner with my mum now she sits there with her eyes wide open and goes, 'What the hell has happened to you? You used to hate eating!'” Freddie Janssen recalls bland cuisine dominating her youth in Maastricht, the Netherlands, with one exception. “There were a lot of Indonesian people and restaurants and little cafes. Having food that, to me, was colorful and exotic and crunchy and spicy and zingy and pickly, I found really exciting. It was so hard to find stuff similar to that. Then I moved to London.”
I’m sitting in the upstairs staff-kitchen of her brand new business, a cafe-farmshop- workspace in east London. With only trace elements of a Dutch accent audible, I siphon off an hour of what emerges as Freddie’s extremely valuable time.
Snackbar, which Freddie co-owns with the space's previous occupants Farmshop, is the culmination of 11 years of working round the clock followed by a more intense prep period in which Freddie—who claims to have no business savvy— grilled industry friends on budget forecasting, cashflow, licensing, and all the fun bureaucracy that precedes buying, then opening, a business in a thriving Zone 2 hubbub. “I've worked around probably some of the most talented and best people in the industry,” she says. “I'm quite comfortable with asking for advice and asking what people's experience has been. Everyone's advice was: Don't do it. Don't take this place on. It's too much work.”
Evidently, Freddie went ahead anyway. Freddie’s relocation happened in 2008 as she pursued work in the music industry. This plan did not work out so, having graduated from university in Amsterdam with a degree in marketing, she became creative director for advertising giants, Protein. During the five years that she held this job, she used her spare time to develop her palate which, eventually, led to a side-hustle as an independent pickler.
How does one end up in such a striking niche of the food industry? According to Freddie it arose organically, in no small part down to a desire to start with simplicity. “The pickling thing was... I was a terrible cook. I looked through cookbooks and it seemed like everything was quite tricky to make but whenever I came across the pickle chapter I was like, 'That seems like something I can do,' so I started experimenting.”
Freddie had conveniently-placed friends meaning that once she hit her pickling stride, there was immediate interest in her acting as a supplier. Three Hackney-based businesses—Rita's Restaurant, the pop-up wine-bar Sager + Wilde and condiment emporium London Borough of Jam—were early investors. Yet pickling was the means, rather than the end. “I always thought that pickling and fermenting was a good way to get into food and as a way to start understanding food and flavors,” says Freddie whose 2016 recipe book, Pickled, also weaves in bitesize chunks of her story. You sense her background in advertising on every lush-feeling page—the design and presentation of information is invitingly simple while mouth- watering photographs leave one yearning for pickle-driven meals. Her take: “If you have a fridge that hasn't got much food, but you have a few nice condiments and pickles, you can elevate a simple weekday meal with lots of flavor and texture.”
“If you have a fridge that hasn't got much food, but you have a few nice condiments and pickles, you can elevate a simple weekday meal with lots of flavor and texture.”
– Freddie Janssen
She began moonlighting at festivals, pop- ups, and market-stalls, staying at Protein until 2013. The next step in what strikes me as an unrelenting treadmill of accumulating knowledge was to become marketing manager at Lyle’s, a Michelin-starred, modern British restaurant in Shoreditch. “I worked there for five years and learned a lot about everything. My plan was always to open a place. On the weekends I did a market- stall and I often did events, festivals and collaborations. I left there in May this year because I’d signed a lease to this building.”
Freddie is referring to Snackbar, which, at the time of our meeting in November 2019 is a bouncing baby of three-months-old. With a cafe front that opens onto Dalston Lane, moments from the main thoroughfare, the property has a garden where bold chickens roam and an empty polytunnel awaits the insertion of herbs and vegetables destined for use on the menu. The ground-floor is home to the cafe and kitchen, while other floors are rented out as co-working spaces for people in the food industry. In the evenings, outside of cafe hours, the lower floor is available for private rents. Amid all this business strategizing, how much time does Freddie have left for menu planning? She laughs, “Like, none!” which makes me feel a little bad about distracting her further with all my questions.
Sandwich: What is your culinary vision for Snackbar?
Janssen: I always want the food to be fun, big platters of sharing food, something that feels social, stuff you can eat with your hands. I like the idea that people come in for lunch and it’s adding a fun element to their day. We do a Singaporean breakfasty snack dish called kaya toast, which is warm toast with coconut jam and a cold slab of thick-cut butter, a soft egg on the side with soy sauce that you dip it in. We make the coconut jam with pandan extract which is ninja-turtle neon green. I like when people come in and don't quite know what it is, so there is an element of surprise.
What place do the pickles have on the menu and how do you combine them with other foodstuffs?
There's a kimchee and grilled cheese toastie which obviously has... kimchee... in it, so that’s the pickle there. We do a pork belly sandwich which has pickled daikon and pickled carrot on it. We’ve got kimchee and cheese in the croissants. We've only been open for three months, so we're still young and figuring out what does and doesn't work. The pickles and the ferments are woven through the whole menu, as well as condiments and all of our own sauces. We're making mustard and ketchup at the moment.
Can you describe sensually—because food is sensual—what it does when you get that pickle hit?
I don’t know if I can do that, haha! I guess it’s when you're having a sandwich and you’ve got, for instance, fatty pork and crispy salad. Then, for me, it's always ‘where is the pickle element?’ I want something crunchy and fresh and zingy and pickly to cut through the fat. It makes sense to eat like that. I’m not doing it on purpose, like, ‘Oh my god, this needs a pickle.’ It just comes naturally as common sense.
You have traveled a fair amount—has that influenced your menu-planning?
When I was working in advertising I got to travel a fair amount to the States — only really to New York, LA, Chicago and Miami. I did a few food productions out there and managed to eat at really nice restaurants — and expense it! I’ve picked the best meals I had at those places and put them on the menu! The best thing I had in Singapore was kaya toast. In Sydney, one of the best things I had and something I’d never had before was Dandan noodles, which is a Chinese version of spag bol. Over the last few years I've been making that over and over again and have come to a recipe which is in the pickle book, we're going to start putting that on the menu here. From Mexico, I'm obsessed with tacos. We do breakfast tacos. Malaysia, you’ve got Rendang—a slow- cooked coconut curry with meat which most of the time is beef but we did a version here with goat and served it on a flatbread with a Malaysian pickle called Achar which we have in the Netherlands as well. It’s a vinegar pickle with turmeric so it turns a nice yellow, and lots of chili. You can use a bit of sambal as well so it's like a spicy turmeric sweet pickle of mainly cabbage and carrot.
Anything on the menu from your time in Japan and Vietnam?
When we opened we had a bánh mì with mortadella. bánh mì always has a sweet garlic pickled daikon and carrot. I love a bánh mì . We did ours with mortadella. Then, two weeks ago, when I did the costings, I was like, ‘Oh my god, we can’t serve this sandwich any more, it’s far too expensive to make!’ From Japan we do a breakfast bowl of lightly seasoned white rice in a bowl with a scrambled egg with soy sauce and then grated fresh daikon on the top. I’m not saying that’s Japanese but it has that shared idea of a clean but filling breakfast.
I've never fully understood what a daikon is.
It's a big radish, really nice and crispy, a white radish. Looks like a massive white carrot.
When you were developing your pickling technique, I know you were experimenting yourself but did you have any formative reference points?
The king of ferments is a guy called Sandor Katz. He wrote a book, ‘The Art of Fermentation’, that's essentially the bible of anything fermented and pickled. I borrowed that from a chef. I read it on holiday and then I was like, ‘I need to get my own copy of this.’ I went to a fermenting and pickling class in Brighton at Silo which is my friend’s restaurant–it’s the world’s first ‘no waste’ restaurant. He was doing a lot of fermenting and had people in the basement making kombucha.
What is the bare minimum kit you would need to pickle?
A bowl and some salt.
Not even vinegar?
No, you can make vinegar pickles or you can make lactic ferment pickles. If you're making sauerkraut, for instance, all you need is salt. You finely shred cabbage, then start working the salt into it, massaging it through and it’ll start releasing all this liquid, so eventually you’ll end up with so much liquid that the vegetable can sit within that liquid and that’s what’s going to ferment it. You could add things like caraway seeds or juniper berries. In terms of vinegar pickles, again, you can experiment with whichever herbs, seasonings, spices that you want to add.
It seems that there are lots of different techniques and flavors that you can use for pickling—is there one process you enjoy more than the others, or do you enjoy the variety?
I enjoy the variety. When you start making things on the scale that we are doing now it’s not to say it’s not fun but you're working with such big vessels. We made these lovely pickles on Sunday. We used a purple radish that I’d never tried before. Things like that get me excited, when I get to use a new ingredient to create new flavors, rather than the method.
What would you recommend as a gateway pickle for someone who's a bit suspicious of pickles?
A dill pickle in a simple sugar-water-vinegar solution. And also sauerkraut, people think it's complicated but all you’re doing is slicing up vegetables really small and working a salt solution into it. The beauty is in the waiting until it’s done and then it’s fermented. The idea of mold growing on top of things scares people, but I’ve never had anything weird happen. If there’s any mold growing you just scoop it off and the rest is totally fine. The only thing that I’ve had problems with is when something keeps fermenting and you don't stabilize it. For instance, I would sell these kimchee hot sauces and it took me so long to make —a 2-3 week ferment of kimchee and a 2-3 week ferment of hot sauce — which I would combine into one really fiery ferment. It was the middle of summer and I delivered it to a few shops. It kept bubbling and going crazy and some of the jars exploded in these nice delis.
