In a hypothetical bracket of sandwich fixings, I’d wager it’s a clear path to the finals for two ingredients in particular: pickles and cheese. Eaten solo, these are excellent snacks; give me a sour spear or a hunk of parm and I’m set. But eaten in concert, they soar. A classic cheeseburger marries crunchy pickle medallions with a layer of velvety cheese—same goes for a fried chicken sandwich, or a tuna melt. I could go on.
Given these truths, I didn’t bat an eye when the latest TikTok hack—pickle in a blanket, as some are calling it—flooded my feed. The concept, introduced to us as a “guilty pleasure snack” by user Claire Snyder (clurmurr) last month, calls for no more than a slice of cheese, fried in a pan until golden and crispy (much like frico), and a pickle spear, which gets enveloped in said shell.
Upon first watch, my initial reaction was: That looks pretty good. What’s not to like about a tart pickle blanketed in lacy cheese? Some BA editors shared my enthusiasm without hesitation; others visibly shuddered at the thought.
TikTok, for the most part, seems sold. A quick search for “pickle cheese” returns scores of ASMR-adjacent videos of sizzly-then-crunchy cheese, most culminating in a chomp shot for dramatic effect. Some innovate on the basic formula, using shredded cheese for the blanket, or plopping a gherkin in the center, or dipping the final product in some kind of accouterment, like fried pickle and ranch dip (meta!) or mayo.
In the interest of science, I moseyed on over to my local Rite Aid and purchased a jar of kosher dill pickles and the only sliced cheese at my disposal—Kraft Singles. The cheese didn’t get quite as crisp as I’d hoped, forming a melty pool and requiring some manual labor and ingenuity to tuck the pickle into its blanket. (Maybe this was a function of my choice of cheese: American, best known for its ability to melt smoothly, might not be the ideal contender for this project.) Once she was…
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