The Best Whole Dill Pickles

Crunchy, tangy, and garlicky, whole dill pickles are a satisfying side and a great snack. Which ones should you buy?

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– What do fried chicken, a deli sandwich, and barbecue have in common? I won’t eat them unless there’s a pickle involved. (chuckles) And it should be a whole pickle ’cause I like ’em crunchy. – Okay. – Yes. – And it should be a dill pickle. So that’s what I brought here.

Traditionally, vinegar pickles are made, as you might imagine, vinegar and salt, and cucumbers. And they can either be pasteurized to be shelf-stable or refrigerated. I will tell you that when we did a tasting of pickle spears, we found a huge difference between the refrigerated and the shelf-stable.

Not so much here with the whole pickles. And I think our theory is, a whole pickle can withstand the higher temperatures of pasteurization, better for the shelf-stable. And so that wasn’t the defining factor. So in addition to shelf-stable and refrigerated, you have lacto fermented. So there’s no vinegar here.

They’re put in a salt brine. The bacteria that’s naturally occurring in the cucumbers begins to convert the natural sugars into lactic acid. So that preserves the mechanism, the tartness that you don’t need the vinegar from. That will also make the pickling liquid cloudy or milky.

And so the one here that looks a little cloudy is lacto fermented. – Jack, my hands grew. – So garlic and dill are the most important flavors here. And we found that if there were competing spices, they kind of drowned out the garlic and dill. – [Bridget] Sure. – Anything that you’re noticing, anything that you’re liking, Julia, why don’t you go first?

– Yeah, this one, C, not such a fan. It’s a little on the watery side, not a ton of flavor. The little ones, the cornichons as I call them, they have a sharp little flavor that I wasn’t expecting, which I kind of like. I put these on cheeseboard.

And so with the cheeseboard, I think that would be lovely. A and B are my favorite. B has a pronounced garlic flavor that I love. It has a lot going on in the flavor, and I dig that. This is like your average American barbecue style pickle. And I love everything about it.

I love the color. It’s a little fluorescent. I love the crunch. It tastes like a pickle. – Right, and if you’re gonna pick a favorite? – Mmm. – All right, you’re gonna go with B. – Mm-hmm. – First of all, I would eat all of these very happily. And I’m going to.

This one just tastes a little less lively than the other ones. – Okay. – I think it’s because the exterior, it’s not that it’s squeaky, but it just feels a little softer. – Okay. – But I’d still eat it. This one is brash and bright, effervescent. Almost too powerful, almost too puckery.

– Okay. – I’m gonna disagree with you. This is, I think my favorite one. – Really? – Because it’s just really fresh. So I’m not getting a whole bunch of spices, but I’m getting just like fresh pickle. – There’s a flavor in there I can’t identify. Wine is what came, vermouth maybe,

That I don’t like in a pickle. – And these, (mouth popping) boy, they are sour. They are good. The best part of these is they hit you twice, going down the throat. Oh! – Maybe it’s a good thing they’re so small. (laughs) – Oh, I’d say there’s more flavor in that

Than three of these combined. – Yeah, true, true. – But I don’t think I could eat too many of them. – Alright, so C for you. – I think so. – B for you. So let’s start with A, which is the mount olive. This was our runner up.

This is a teeny bit softer. This is a shelf-stable one. But we thought it was delicious and our favorite of the shelf-stable. If you wanna not crowd your refrigerator with a pickle jar, go ahead and keep that in the pantry. – [Bridget] Why not? B is the lacto fermented.

And it’s a lot of pickle. – It’s a lot of pickle. It has a lot of spices, which I think you were picking up on, that there’s more than just garlic and dill. Our tasters really wanted garlic and dill and felt like there were too many other flavors.

But you love the fact that it was more complicated. – Yeah. – You’re just a complicated person. You chose the winner from Boar’s Head. – Yay! – So this is a refrigerated pickle. It’s just basically cucumber, garlic, and dill. It’s crisp, it’s fresh. And then D is McClure’s.

Now we all thought these are really sour. There’s a lot of vinegar in those pickles. Even though they’re little, they pack a punch. I mean you. – Yes, they were. – Oh, and they just were too tart, too sour. I mean, I like a sour pickle, but that’s a sour pickle.

Bridget did pick the winner. – There you go. – Which comes from Boar’s head. Nicely done. – Take our recipes and reviews wherever you go with the America’s Test Kitchen mobile app. Failproof recipes, unbiased equipment reviews, how-to videos, and a vibrant community of like-minded home cooks. With smart searching and handy tools,

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