In the infinite universe of pickle selections your travels often take you to places you seldom frequent and you can find varieties and brands that you wouldn't ordinarily seek out. Well, due to a weird pandemic shortage of Solo Almond Filling (for Gretchen's bakery), I found myself in a Meijer store on the other side of Ann Arbor (about 15 miles west). Since I was in a grocery store, and had located the last 2 cans of the stuff for 25 miles, I dug out the shopping list and found we were out of bread'n'butter sweet pickles.
If you're not familiar with the Meijer chain, they're a Grand Rapids, MI based chain of everything-stores, they're positively monstrously large buildings with a full grocery store, department store, hardware store and outdoor gardening store all under one roof. When we were growing up, they were a novelty and were known as "Meijer's Friendly Acres". No kidding! I detest getting anything in that store because every visit is 45 minutes, regardless of how much stuff you're picking up.
After a 10 minute search for the pickle aisle, I found them, but didn't find any chunk-style bread'n'butter pickles, like we prefer in the Kroger store brand. I hadn't tried Meijer's offering, so I picked up a jar of their "chips".
They're crinkle-cut, and seemed to have plenty of the mustard seed and onions that other store brands often skimp on. Upon opening the jar, the pickles were sticking out above the brine level, so I figured those couple might be a little on the limp side--they were. What I didn't expect is for most of the jar to be pretty limp.
The flavor was good, though; not too sweet, and a tad more vinegary than I was expecting. You "grow into" the vinegar strength, although there's enough there that you won't have to worry about burning through a jar of these. Like the McClure's pickles, the vinegar acts as a brake on things, although, McClure's pickles set the bar.
These are good muncher pickles to have "straight up" on the side, but would also be an excellent sandwich or burger topping. The "not too sweet" character puts 'em up there. I made a burger and had these on top and they worked well. They'd be perfect on a meatloaf sandwich!
Lastly, they weren't that expensive...these ain't no $9 pickles. I think they were around $2.39 for a decent sized jar.
No comments:
Post a Comment