Dill or No Dill

Workshop Celebrates the Art of Pickling

Graphic Eric Bent

Nostrils fill with the pungent smell of vinegar. Then a second wave hits, the smell of dill, equally strong but less offensive.

Inside the kitchen of Santropol Roulant, plates of pickles are spread out between five workstations for people to taste-test. Each station is equipped with a knife, a bowl of pickling spice and a mixture of raw vegetables.

An older man in the center greets the workshop attendees, and a girl wearing a green t-shirt with a picture of smiling pickles appears to be in charge. These two are Simon Witenoff and his daughter Mollie, and they run the Santropol pickle workshop.

Simon, a pickler since childhood, is the grandson of the founder of Mrs. Whyte’s pickles, a family business that began in the 1930s.

Witenoff’s grandfather had a business delivering bread to Montreal’s Jewish community with his horse and buggy, and his wife convinced him to start selling her pickles to his bread customers. The brand was created in 1932, and Mrs. Whyte’s has since grown into a mass producer of pickles and relishes across Canada.

Witenoff began working in the factory at the age of thirteen. About fifteen years ago he sold the business, but his love and knowledge for pickling lives on.

“They called us the Pickle Doctors,” Witenoff said of himself and his friend Jimmy, a worker at the factory who taught him the art of pickle tasting. Today, the Pickle Doctors taste where people have gone wrong and help them figure out how to improve the batch. Every summer, Witenoff ferments a barrel of pickles—about 400 half-liter jars—for himself and to give away.

“For me, it is pure joy and relaxation,” he explained. “When my kitchen smells like garlic and dill, I am in heaven.”

At the workshop, Witenoff taught two different ways of making pickles. The first was a simple fridge pickle made with vinegar brine and mixed veggies, called the jardinière.

Participants packed a quart-size jar with a colourful array of vegetables—cauliflower, celery, tomatillos, carrots and red and orange peppers. The flavour of this pickle comes from the vegetables, but Witenoff also offered participants the option of adding garlic, serrano peppers, dill flowers and pickling spices.

He also proposed that people get more creative when they pickle on their own, as you can really make pickles “to taste.”

The second pickle was made with the traditional cucumber—you have to use field or “pickling” cucumbers, because they have thicker skin, giving them their signature crunch. Tiny cucumbers are the most highly coveted for their bite-size and thick skin. Cucumbers can be preserved with the same brine as the jardinière, for a sourer vinegar flavour, but they can also be fermented.

Fermentation does not include vinegar—it is strictly salt and water. It makes the kind of pickles that Mrs. Whyte’s is famous for, the ones sold at grocery stores across the country, or that accompany your smoked meat sandwich.

At the end of the workshop, everyone got to take home their own jar of each kind of pickles. Jackie Martin, a volunteer at Concordia’s Mackay greenhouse, said the workshop opened her eyes to how easy pickling is.

“It demystified [pickling],” she said, “I always thought it was a lot more difficult, but I’m not as scared to pickle anymore.”