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It’s brine dining.
A first of its kind frozen dill pickle pizza has just launched at Whole Foods — after intensive recipe development and in-depth research of the NYC pickle scene.
“We worked on it for maybe two years until we got it just right — boy did we ever,” food manufacturer Gail Becker, 60, told The Post of the $9.99 pie.
Becker, the CEO of Caulipower frozen pizzas, and her husband canvassed Jewish delis around Manhattan, from Barney Greengrass on the Upper West and Pastrami Queen on the Upper East Side to Sarge’s in Murray Hill and Katz’s on the Lower East Side, sampling all sorts of pickles as part of their research.
“[We] made it our mission to try every deli in New York. Sometimes we’d walk five miles, 10 miles — as much as 17 miles,” said Becker, who grew up in Los Angeles and moved to NYC a couple years back.
They were ultimately most taken by The Pickle Guys on Essex Street, with its heaping barrels of pickles.
“They have 20 different barrels. Pickled onions, pickled cabbage — pickled everything,” she said.
The store has been a mainstay of the neighborhood since 1910, when there were bustling brine markets throughout the Lower East Side.
“People were coming there from all over New York. They were filling little containers with fresh pickles —any you could imagine,” Becker said.
The shop’s garlicky variety, a sweet and tangy flavor with a hint of vinegar and sugar, inspired the recipe for the brine used to make Becker’s pizza, which features a creamy bechamel sauce flavored with brine, along with roasted garlic, mozzarella and fresh dill.
While Becker initially envisioned topping the pizza with actual pickle slices, that didn’t work out.
“It has to freeze — it’s a lot for the pickle,” Becker said.
Exploring the city’s pickle scene was especially meaningful for the Gramercy resident who is of Jewish descent.
Both her late parents were Holocaust survivors. Becker’s father’s first job in America was working in a bakery on the Lower East Side near the pickle stores on Essex Street.
“He didn’t speak English when he came … had no family, no money,” she said. “He was from Germany, he was a survivor. He got off the boat and found himself a job sweeping the floor of the a bakery on the Lower East Side,”
At one point, Becker considered making the pizza even more deli-like, topping it with with hamburger meat and thousand island dressing.
“I kind of had this crazy idea,” she said.
But, ultimately she decided against it.
“I’m kind of a purist — this pizza doesn’t need anything [more],” she said. “It was just meant to be a Tuesday night thing, a Friday night thing. I hope it makes people smile.”
She also hopes it brings families together — just as researching the pizza brought her closer to her father, Martin Jacob Becker, who died in 2015.
“When I walk the streets of the Lower East Side, I really feel him. I really see him. I can picture him. It’s probably one of my favorite parts of New York,” she said. “In many ways I think this pizza is for him.”
