Liven Up Basic Cocktail Sauce With One Briny Addition

If you're anything like me, you love a good sinus-cleaning from a cocktail sauce. I want more than just the barest hint of a kick. I want to be left hollering and then marveling over the fact that I can miraculously breathe through both nostrils again. I find that I carry this mentality over into most other foods I enjoy, too; the bigger and bolder the flavors, the more I love them. And while you can make a mean shrimp cocktail just by boiling your shrimp in something besides plain water, you're really missing out if you don't take the opportunity to dress up your cocktail sauce, too. You can toss tons of different ingredients into a cocktail sauce to spruce it up, but today, let's focus on pickle juice.

I'll just say this ahead of time: if you hate pickles, this isn't for you. That briny, vinegared flavor just isn't something you can hide away in a cocktail sauce. The whole point of splashing it in is to enjoy the savory, sour notes that only pickle brine can bring to a dish, after all. But if you're a pickle fan? Grab your favorite jar and add, well, just a small dash to start. Pickle juice is a pretty strong flavor and you don't want it totally drowning your cocktail sauce out.

When working with pickle juice, there are more ways to go about using it to even the simplest of dishes than you might think. If you want a briny and salt-forward shrimp cocktail sauce that rivals sea water in the best way, add a splash of pickle juice to the serving dish right before bringing it to the table. But if you want a more complex sauce where the flavors have time to meld together, mix up a batch at least a few hours before serving and let it sit in the fridge until it's time to eat.

You can also try out different types of pickle juice, too. Dill's a great one, as the herb itself pairs nicely with ingredients in a cocktail sauce, which is mostly ketchup, horseradish, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. You could also grab a jar of bread and butter pickles, which lean sweeter. That sweetness helps cut through some of the acidity in the pickling vinegar and balances out any spice in the cocktail sauce beautifully. Don't be afraid to try a few test batches out to see where your personal preferences end up; they'll all be delicious, so you really can't go wrong.