Good, high quality dill pickles

• Wash
• eggs
• buttermilk
• dill weed
• dill pickle juice
• Louisiana Hot Sauce

• Breading
• 2 ¼ c flour
• 1 c corn meal
• smoked paprika
• salt
• pepper
• chili powder
• garlic powder
• onion powder
• oregano
• thyme
• cayenne powder
• dill weed

Heat the frying oil. Use your favorite frying technique.

Quarter the dill pickles. Place on a length of paper towels and roll up. We are removing excess moisture here.

Prepare the wash. Mix an equal number of eggs to cups of buttermilk. Make enough to handle the number of pickles you are going to fry. Season with dill, a dash of pickle juice and hot sauce.

Mix the breading ingredients into a shallow bowl, suitable for dropping a pickle into.

Remove the pickles from the paper towel. Only prepare the number of pickles you can fry at one time. Dip a pickle in the wash and then drop in the breading and move pickle around to cover. Fry the pickles until they are golden brown. Allow to cool slightly, but serve hot.

The motivation for this recipe originally came when I heard that Elvis loved fried pickles. I'd heard of fried candy bars, but never pickles. I was intrigued, so I started looking for them. But I was unsuccessful. Alton Brown had a fried pickle recipe, but it produced the equivalent of coarse sandpaper sheathed pickles. Not good eats, no matter what he says.

I had pretty much given up the fried pickle quest until the summer of 2009, when I returned to the homeland of western Pennsylvania and ate at a Quaker Steak and Lube. They had excellent fried pickles!

So, with that as inspiration, I scoured the web for recipes, tried a bunch and took what I liked best from each.