These Are The Best Bread And Butter Pickles You Can Buy At The Store
Bread and butter pickles aren't a terribly complicated product: All you need are standard pickling ingredients (vinegar, pickling salt, sugar), some spices, and, naturally, the cucumbers themselves. Yet despite this simplicity, the bread and butter pickles on grocery store shelves vary a lot in terms of taste and quality. This is exactly what one Chowhound reviewer found out when she ranked 11 of the most common bread and butter pickle brands out there.
Our reviewer looked for pickles that had the right balance of tangy vinegar and sweetness (without too much sugar), and an appropriately firm, crunchy, and non-mushy texture. One brand came out on top: Boar's Head bread and butter pickle chips. They checked those aforementioned boxes, striking the perfect balance of sweet and sour or tangy, while also being appropriately crunchy. The flavors added to the brine were also a big hit: Crack open the jar and you should be hit with the scent of fresh mustard seed, which adds a punchy note that's balanced out with earthy cumin and coriander. The exact combo of spices is hard to pin down: The ingredient list just names "spices" without getting into specifics (except for turmeric, which is listed separately, but it's added for color rather than flavor). But whatever the exact mix of spices, it's a winner, providing a complex mix of flavor notes that will elevate any sandwich or provide a robust pop of flavor to your breakfast.
Are there any downsides?
Despite its top ranking, there are a few things you should know about the Boar's Head bread and butter pickles. Firstly, you'll pay for that high quality: A 26-ounce jar goes for around $6 at a supermarket like Kroger — that's double or even triple the price of other cheaper equivalents in the same store. Secondly, and a bit more subjectively, if you prefer your flavors classic and simple, the spice mix here might not be exactly to your taste. The Boar's Head pickles are a "new age" version of this classic pickle, so those who prefer a really traditional recipe might find these a little intense or overpowering.
It's worth noting that Boar's Head offers a horseradish variety of the bread and butter pickles. Plenty of people love them for a similarly ideal balance of spicy, sweet, and tangy. They're the kind of thing you could easily snack on straight out of the jar, although they're similarly expensive. If you think $6 for pickles is too much, you may want to know which (much cheaper) pickles came up worst in our ranking: Aldi's Great Gherkins brand. You'll certainly spend less on these, but the overwhelming sweetness just isn't worth it. You might be better off just splurging on the Boar's Head varieties.