The pickleback — a shot of whisky chased with pickle brine — is the bartender's trick that makes everyone a convert the first time and a skeptic the second. This recipe takes that same logic and freezes it into custard: the sweet-sour-dill wallop of gherkin juice carried on a creamy base, with a splash of vodka keeping the texture scoopable and the flavor sharp. The inspiration is Kühne's own pickled cucumber ice-cream recipe, adapted here into a home-kitchen custard method. The base is orthodox — egg, sugar, milk, double cream cooked low and slow until it coats a spoon — and the orthodoxy is the point. You need a stable, fatty foundation to carry that much acid and funk without the whole thing tasting like a mistake. Dill goes in off the heat, finely chopped, alongside 10ml of pickle juice. The vodka follows — 20ml, though rum, tequila, or whisky all work — and does double duty: flavor sharpener and anti-freeze agent, lowering the freezing point enough that the finished scoop stays yielding rather than turning to a brick. Churning in a machine is ideal, but the stir-every-30-minutes method works fine. The flavor profile the recipe promises — 'sweet and dilly, but also tart and sour, with a lingering complexity from all the spices' — is accurate and, once you stop being startled by it, genuinely pleasant. The suggestion to serve with savoury waffles, bacon, and maple syrup is not a joke. The sweet-salt-acid triangle there is the same logic as a good vinaigrette on a fatty salad. Served in a cone with a whole gherkin on top, this is a conversation piece first and a dessert second. That's fine. Some food exists to make a point, and the point here — that the flavor compounds in pickle brine aren't categorically different from the acid and aromatics in any other interesting ice cream — is a good one.
