The BOWSONG PICKLES Story
BOWSONG PICKLES was created to bring bold flavors and real ingredients together in unique handcrafted recipes.
It started with a jar that did not exist. A pickle with the heat of a chili oil and the citrus of a street-cart taco. Nobody sold it, so we made forty gallons in a rented commercial kitchen and gave most of it away at a farmers market in Santa Monica.
We sold out by noon. We have been making pickles ever since.
Four batches that mattered.
Forty gallons, one rented kitchen
The first Chili Lime recipe. Sold out at the Santa Monica farmers market before lunch.
The soy sauce jar
Built for the rice bowls we actually eat at home. It outsold the chili within a month.
Onto the shelf
Six specialty grocers and Asian markets across California picked us up.
Still packing by hand
Same recipe. Same 21 days. More jars, no shortcuts.
Nine ingredients, and we can tell you where each one came from.
English cucumbers, only — thin-skinned and nearly seedless, so they hold their snap through the full ferment. Two family farms in the Central Valley, picked to order.
Chilies & limes — bought weekly at the same Los Angeles market our founder grew up shopping in.
Soy sauce — naturally brewed from soybeans, wheat, water and salt. Never hydrolyzed, never caramel-colored.
Salt and time — twenty-one days of fermentation, which is the only preservative a pickle has ever needed.
Make the jar we wanted to buy, and never cheapen it once people start buying it.
That means we will always tell you what is in the jar, we will keep the batches small enough to taste every one, and we will not add a preservative to make a shelf life look better on a spreadsheet.
Taste the batch