Crispy Is Job One

RICK FIELD, the man behind Rick's Picks, the Lower East Side's latest contribution to the world of pickles, leads me to his office in an artsy Chrystie St. building. I'm surprised to find that the pickle guy looks more like an indie actor-blue clogs, low-rise corduroys, a coat of scruff-than the honest blue-collar Sam the Pickle Man from Crossing Delancey.

As soon as we enter, Field is on the phone. "We need 325 pounds of kirbies, and 225 pounds of green beans," he demands, until his cell rings the tango, and he puts one call on hold to answer another.

Field started making pickles in 1997 out of his Brooklyn apartment. He now runs the business end out of this 12 x 18 artist's studio in a building full of other artists and creative entrepreneurs. Field's office shows the telltale signs of a cultivated eccentric: The room is a boon of esoteric tchochkes. There is the predictable pickle paraphernalia, including children's drawings of pickles and the kind of glass pickle and garlic ornaments you'd find at ABC Carpet and Home. The wall above a heavy, 50s-era metal desk is covered with what must be hundreds of rubber stamps. Eerie little dolls stare out from an antique pharmacy cabinet, where items like hair cream keep them company.

Among these oddities, the jars of pickles that are Field's stock-in-trade seem less like sale items than another element of the eclectic décor. As decorative statements, the cucumber spears, beets and green beans suspended in tinted fluid are interchangeable with the preserved rats' tails, cows' eyeballs and human brains of a mad scientist's lair.

In its peculiar way, this all makes sense. Whether he chooses to wear the hat or not, this specialty pickle maker is the answer to a new generation of the neighborhood's pickling tradition. The city has gotten so much mileage out of Gus's Pickles on nearby Orchard St. and the Pickle Guys on Essex that they've become novelty acts-guide-book attractions at the tenement theme park. Its rich but fading heritage as home to Eastern European Jews and their delicacies has marked the Lower East Side as an area where all things briny and preserved are still very much revered. At $10 a jar and made with rarefied ingredients like coconut, wasabi, cherries and hibiscus flowers, Rick's Picks are just as much a novelty, albeit of the new, artsy constituents who favor gourmet groceries over griebenes.

Field wasn't always a pickle guy. The 41-year-old is a 15-plus-year veteran of the television industry. He has jumped from producing such programming as VH1's Top 100s and Now with Bill Moyers to a full-time gig in brining.

"I've been pickling since I was a kid with my folks in Vermont," says Field. "I realized there was no reason why I couldn't do it [in New York]. I had a stove. I had a pot."

Field began using produce purchased at the Grand Army Plaza Green Market near his Brooklyn apartment. "I would get 20 pounds of beets, 20 pounds of cucumbers and 20 pounds of peppers, and I had to pickle it then and there or they would turn." He still uses local produce in most of his products.

Field opens several jars of his pickles for a tasting. He starts off using a scientific-looking pickle fork-a plastic tube that looks like a ballpoint pen with retractable prongs-but soon reverts to his fingers. He fishes out some Phat Beets, sweet-and-sour beets with rosemary, GT1000s, jammy curried green tomatoes, and Bee n' Beez, bread-and-butter pickles sweetened with coconut and dried cherries. Then two more varieties that were adapted from his mother's recipes: Spears of Influence, garlicky cucumber spears with cumin and Mean Beans, feisty green beans in cayenne-dill brine. All of the pickles are original, crispy and incredibly flavorful, with zest and tang.

"I season them more aggressively because that's what people want nowadays," says Field. Grabbing a binder off the shelf, he flips to a typewritten recipe for Mean Beans, courtesy of mom. On the page, he has crossed out her modest measurement for cayenne and doubled it.

Packaged in mason jars with those goofy names, Field is a master of appearances. For example, the hokey down-home copy that accompanies Rick's Picks' "Kool Gherks": "Most folks munch these guys down whole, but we think it's cool to slice 'em thin and stick 'em on a cracker with a slice of extra sharp cheddar." Such lines betray his past life as an image maker.

"The whole idea of local food is hot right now," says the Yale grad. "For me to be able to say to our audiences, we made them with locally grown beans-that's cool."

Just recently Field switched from producing the pickles on his own to a factory-run operation in Poughkeepsie, and rises at the crack of dawn every Tuesday morning to oversee production there. Hours are spent cleaning and preparing vegetables and adjusting the manufacture of a food item that went from batches of 12 in Field's kitchen to batches of 1000 at the factory. Soon, Field will sell his pickles at New York City's Green Markets, premiering on September 11 in Inwood and on September 8 in Union Square. The pickles can also be purchased online.

Field is still adjusting to the ups and downs of the normal pitfalls of food production. One week, says Field, the green beans were sublime. The next, "they were a little horsey, not as fresh, not as virginal."

"The number-one adjective in pickle culture is crispy," says Field. "When I get out there I take a cucumber out of the box, break it in two, take a bite and see how well the week will go." o