Virtually the entire crop of Ontario’s cucumbers used to make pickles and relish are purchased by a firm in Wisconsin.

By Jennifer Wells   –   Hamilton Spectator

THAMESVILLE, ONT. — It’s hot — a real scorcher — and the parched dirt kicks up underfoot as the farmer leads the way to a cucumber field that is a carpet of green leaf laced with sun yellow flowers.

The farmer stands tall in the field as he snaps a fist-sized cucumber in half, takes a few bites, then lobs the remainder in a high arc against a soft blue sky.

“It’s too big,” says Adrian Jaques, by which he means the cuke he’s tossing has outgrown not only its dill pickle potential but even its relish potential, for it is watery and heavily seeded.

Adrian Jaques, owner of Sunshine Farms located near Thamesville, Ontario.

That single cucumber is an outlier. It’s rare for a cuke to be rejected at Sunshine Farms, run by the Jaques family just north of Thamesville, about 80 km southwest of London.

Seventy-five per cent of the cucumbers grown in Ontario are hand harvested, and the Jaques operation is no exception. This is a crucial harvesting distinction from the U.S., where machine harvesting cucumbers means making a one-time pass, where plant and cucumbers, from the wee to the super-sized, are wrenched from the field all at a go. Job done.

Hand harvesting allows multiple passes along the plant rows, so those strangely warted baby dills remain undamaged and pint-sized, and the whole dills are stout and just the way you like them. Sunshine cucumbers go from harvest to brine within a day or two. Sometimes, a cucumber goes from field to jar in the span of a single day, the ultimate “fresh pack.”

The nubs and crooks and castoffs get fed through a chopper, then mixed in a vat with organic sugar and vinegar, red peppers, onion salt and spices (turmeric, mustard seed, celery seed) to create a home-grown, home-processed organic sweet relish of incomparable taste. No water is added in the process. There are no chemical additives or preservatives and no colouring, which explains why the relish does not bear the artificial emerald green hue of some of its competitors.

Well, “competitors” overstates the case. Sunshine is small, with revenues of about $800,000 annually. The company hasn’t been in the pickling game all that long, relative to the five generations of the Jaques family that have farmed in Chatham-Kent. It was Adrian’s father, John, who seized upon the idea of pickling asparagus back in the early ’80s, and ever since then the company has been processing pickled spears, including a “zesty” version enhanced by jalapeno peppers.

“Our biggest market for our pickled asparagus is bars and restaurants to put in Caesars,” says Adrian. “It has a nice crunch to it and it stands up well in a glass.”

Alberta and B.C. were early adopters. “We started in the western market because they’ve always been ahead of the curve when it comes to natural and organic,” he says.

Sunshine’s flight of pickle products extends now to fiery dills, bread and butter pickles, pickled beets, pickled carrots, pickled garlic, pickled jalapenos and more. The Big Carrot on the Danforth and Ambrosia Natural Foods in Vaughan are two of the retailers that carry Sunshine product. Costco has started carrying the one-litre jars of pickled asparagus. Relish production, meanwhile, doubled last year to more than 300 cases. Production this year should increase again by 25 per cent.

If not a singular story, Sunshine’s is certainly one that goes against the tide.

“There used to be a pickle brining operation in almost every small town in southwestern Ontario,” says Craig Hunter of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association.

Heinz produced its sour spiced gherkins and sour mixed pickles at its Leamington plant even before the first ketchup was bottled in 1910. Bick’s started in the pickle business in the 1940s in Scarborough, its name long synonymous with Canadian pickles until it became synonymous with multinational takeovers. The Bick’s processing plant in Dunnville and its pickle tank farm in Delhi have been four years idle since U.S. parent J.M. Smucker Co. announced the closure of both facilities.

“People are buying branded name pickles in our grocery stores and they don’t read the fine print to see where those pickles are actually from,” Hunter says.

Today, 98 per cent of Ontario’s cucumbers are purchased by vegetable broker Hartung Brothers, Inc., of Madison, Wisc. There’s a better than excellent chance that the product sitting on the Ontario grocery shelf is processed in the U.S.

Then there’s India. Loblaws No Name sweet green relish, baby dills, polskie ogorki and dill chips are all clearly labelled product of India. Adrian Jaques says that consumers are increasingly taking note. “We’re finding a lot more people contacting us and saying, ‘I’ve been buying these pickles for a long time and I looked at the label and they’re made in India. I never knew that.'”

A few years ago, he recalls, a businessman from India checked out the Sunshine operation, expressing interest in pickled asparagus. He had no interest in dills or relish. Holding a litre jar of baby dills in his hand he said, “I can have this harvested, packed and shipped to Toronto for $1.29.” Who can compete with that?

For Sunshine, the “Buy Local” push has been a great help, Jaques says, as has the focus on organic. But Craig Hunter notes that those seeking local produce remain a small slice of the market. “Consumers vote with their pocketbook. They always vote for what’s cheapest and they don’t really care if their head of lettuce was grown in the Bradford Marsh or Arizona. There are very few consumers who will say I won’t buy it because it wasn’t produced locally.”

Alan Woodbridge, vice-president at family-owned Lakeside Packing Co., says the stay local movement has, on the contrary, been a great boon. Woodridge’s grandfather started the company in Harrow in 1948, spurred by a desire to meet the consumer tastes of immigrating Europeans. No question recent years have been tough. “We’ve been at it for 70 years and we’re still fighting,” says Woodbridge. But, he adds, “Everyone is asking for our product because it’s Ontario grown and Ontario manufactured.”

Lakeside produces a range of relishes, including tangy dill and corn relish. The most popular? Sweet green, of course. The company has found success too in the bulk market, supplying hamburger and hotdog companies, and even exporting to European hotdog vendors.

The Jaques family is hoping that growing demand for local foods — an initiative pushed by the government of Premier Kathleen Wynne — will lead to a doubling of Sunshine’s operation within a decade.

New products are being tested, including pickled sliced onions, and this summer Sunshine has planted its first ever crop of organic horseradish. Adrian Jaques has left behind a teaching career to focus exclusively on building the company, so there’s a great deal of optimism at stake.

There’s a good amount of success to back that up. After all, it was a swift-footed John Jaques who watched in dismay as free-trade and the folding of Ontario-base food processors forced him to rethink what to do with all that asparagus that used to be destined for canned spears.

“It was stressful because our main customers for our product were the processors, and slowly but surely they all moved south of the border to brother or sister production plants,” Adrian says. “We immediately started cutting back our acreage because everyone had to sell onto the fresh market at that point. You get that much extra product on the market and the price plummets.”

A holidaying John Jaques adds via email that free trade “almost devastated our asparagus farming business. At the time free trade was implemented almost all of our produce was sold to several of the 12 asparagus processors in Canada. After free trade processors started purchasing finished products from the U.S. and eventually Peru and after a few years all quit processing asparagus in Canada.”

The Jaques operation wasn’t set up for grading and packaging asparagus for the fresh market. So the family started experimenting — freezing, dehydrating, even a puréed version. “One thing that resonated with everyone was pickled asparagus,” says Adrian.

So the Jaques clan became pickling experts — it didn’t hurt that Adrian’s mother, Claudia, proved an excellent resource when it came to recipe testing and that a serendipitous meeting between John and a grocery executive in a hot tub at the Banff Springs Hotel would prove central to launching pickled asparagus in Alberta.

Pickled pickles was an obvious path to greater growth.

Back in the field, foreman Aristeo Perez Garcia leads his small picking crew up the rows of cucumbers and back. Each year for the past 17, Perez Garcia has flown in from his home in San Miguel Tenochtitlán, Mexico, where he grows corn, to work for the Jaques family. The crew started at 6 this morning. By early afternoon, they’re driving the day’s harvest to Sunshine’s fantastically rickety pickle separator, a remnant of the heyday of another Ontario pickle works. The separator shimmies and shakes as the cucumbers are separated by grade and when it sputters, Adrian Jaques gets a wrench and fixes the thing.

Those cucumbers destined to be dills will later be placed into jars by hand. The dried dill is scooped into those jars by hand. The relish is stirred in big vats, by hand, to which the sweetening and seasoning is added, by hand. For a moment it feels as though the clock has been turned back 100 years. It’s certainly the antithesis of the globalized marketplace.

Adrian Jaques hopes consumers will see the value in products grown and processed right here at home. Perhaps the waning days of summer spent tending a backyard barbecue is a moment to hit the point home.

There’s only one more question to ask: which pickle does Adrian Jaques prefer on his burger? There’s no dawdling with the answer: he loves the relish and the dills, but when it comes to his burger, Adrian Jaques is a bread and butter pickle man.

By Doris Reynolds   –   Naples Daily News

What did Cleopatra, Queen Victoria, Napoleon, Aristotle, Andy Griffith, Elvis Presley and Thomas Jefferson have in common? They were all passionate pickle mavens with a craving for the pungent perfect puckerer.

Long before spas, beauty salons, wellness centers and gyms existed, Queen Cleopatra turned to pickles to enhance her raven locks and luminescent skin. Each day she scarfed down pecks of pickles to enhance her health and beauty. Pickles were the beauty treatment of Egyptian women who had no Botox, collagen, facelifts, tummy tucks, rhinoplasty, eye lifts, breast augmentation or liposuction. Instead, they visited the pickle packer for sure-fire youth-enhancing treatments.

Julius Caesar was so enchanted by Cleo’s formula for strength and beauty he ordered that a plenitude of pickles be on the menu at his orgies and banquets. His troops also benefited from the rage for pickles. They were included in their daily rations. He could have listened to Aristotle who also was an advocate of pickles and spread the word about their benefits for health and stamina.

Queen Victoria was another famous pickle enthusiast. She didn’t bother with pickles as a beauty treatment but she ordered that pickles be at table for every meal. Her zest for pickles also was manifested in her picnic lunches, where they were a part of every outdoor meal.

Our best-known, home-grown pickle proponent, Elvis Presley, had a passion for deep-fried dill pickles. But Elvis was not alone in packing away pickles; his fellow-Americans consume more than 2.5 billion pounds of pickles each year. In case you’re counting, that’s 20 billion pickles. And because it takes almost 4 billion average-sized pickles to reach the moon, all the pickles eaten would reach the moon and back more than twice.

How did the pickle get its name? According to the Encyclopedia of Useless Knowledge, the pickle got its name in the 1300s when English-speaking people mispronounced the name of a Dutch fisherman who specialized in pickling fish. His unpronounceable name, William Beukeiz, supposedly came out: pickle.

The pickle-packing industry in the United States began in 1659, when Dutch farmers in what is now Brooklyn grew cucumbers and sold them to dealers who cured them in barrels and sold them to eager gourmets seeking a pickle fix. In wasn’t until 1820 that pickles were packed in jars. Credit goes to Frenchman Nicholas Appert, who first packed pickles in glass containers.

Pickle history began sometime around 2030 B.C., when inhabitants of northern India brought cucumber seeds to the Tigris Valley. Soon, cucumber vines were sprouting throughout Europe. Shortly thereafter, people learned to preserve the cukes by pickling them in salty brine. By the 17th century, the crunchy munchies made their debut in the New World.

I can’t guarantee that pickles will cure what ails you, but advocates of folk medicine claim that sour pickles help balance the acid-alkaline content of the body and destroy bacteria in the digestive tract.

Surely you must agree that such a prestigious product deserves accolades and recognition. And leave to the folks in Arkansas to have a yearly picklefest. The people in Atkins, Arkansas, are addicted to pickles and each year they pay homage to the sour and sweet by celebrating with a festival where the pickle rules the day.

With so many great pickles on the grocer’s shelf, I don’t expect you to put up your own pickles. To improve the most paltry pickle, here’s a sure-fire recipe to make pickles even more palatable.

CANDIED SWEET PICKLES

Drain juice from a quart of whole sweet pickles or a quart of sweet pickle chips and discard the juice (easiest to use the chips). Cut each pickle lengthwise if using whole pickles. Place the pickles back in the jar and add 1 stick of cinnamon. Combine in a saucepan: 2 cups sugar, 1 cup apple cider, 1 tablespoon celery seed and 2 teaspoons mustard seed. Bring to a boil, stirring until sugar dissolves. Skim the spices from the sugar/vinegar mixture and put into the jar. Pour hot mixture over the pickles. Put the lid on the jar and leave at room temperature. When pickles have cooled, put in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 days before eating. Will keep for several months if refrigerated.

By Bill Lynch , Staff Writer   –   Charleston Gazette-Mail

Editor’s note: Reporter Bill Lynch started 2016 on a bold mission: to immerse himself in a different facet of life for a full month — every month — for all of 2016, and write about it along the way. The idea is to take something he knows precious little about, which fortunately is a longer list than you might expect, and learn about it by doing as much as possible. In August, Bill’s tackling the fine art of food preservation.

I’ve wanted to know how to can, pickle or otherwise preserve my own food for a while, since I moved into my house outside of Charleston a few years ago. I just haven’t done much about it.

For the last four years, I’ve kept a garden in my backyard.

It’s nothing spectacular. I usually grow a couple of varieties of tomato, some zucchini, a few carrots and whatever happens to look good in the seed catalogs when they start showing up in my mailbox in December.

I am not a great gardener.

What I lack in talent, I try to make up with flagging enthusiasm. I tend to be more interested in the planning and planting and less enthusiastic when it comes to cultivating and weeding.

Still, ever year, I learn something — usually, what not to do.

One year, I grew a 6-foot row of ragweed. It looked like eggplant to me, and I had plants over 18 inches tall before I figured out what I’d done.

Most years, I grow too much of something — too many peppers, too many tomatoes, too many onions.

I also have a couple of fruit trees. Some years, I’m overrun with apples. Other years, I end up with more pears than even the deer can polish off in a single summer.

This year, I have too many cucumbers.

I don’t even particularly like cucumbers. I just grew them because I thought maybe I could make ice box pickles.

I like pickles, but don’t like cucumbers. I’m not the only one.

In hindsight, two cucumber plants would have been enough, but missing the part where someone told me how many cucumbers you get per plant, I put in five. The plants have taken over half of my garden, and, with the rainy summer, I’m getting a pound or two of cucumbers just about every other day.

I’ve tried giving them away, but there are only so many cucumbers anyone will take. At least I couldn’t get rid of that many in the newsroom. Maybe if I’d frosted them like donuts and added sprinkles …

I needed to do something before my late-planted tomatoes started to ripen and my kitchen was overrun with produce.

So I put in a call to John Porter, WVU agricultural extension agent and Sunday Gazette-Mail Garden Guru.

John is not just a go-to guy for basic gardening questions, which I’ve thrown his way a couple of times. He’s also a good source for other sort of home farming/rural living questions.

The extension office offers tons of information and hosts classes and workshops, including the occasional one about home canning, not that John needed to get a degree to learn things like canning and pickling.

He’s been doing it since he was a kid.

“I used to can with my mother,” John said. “My father used to can green beans outside over a fire in a metal drum that had been split in half.”

John didn’t recommend canning green beans that way, though it sounded kind of awesome.

“Food safety,” he explained.

Green beans, John said, should be canned with a pressure canner.

“They aren’t acidic enough,” he said.

I met John at his office, which houses a huge kitchen with three or four stoves, a couple of ovens, and more counter space than your average Taco Bell.

There were plenty of modern appliances, pots and pans of every size, and enough cabinets and drawers to hold all the stuff.

I was a little envious. My kitchen isn’t bad, but it is a little dated. Most of the major appliances were installed during the Reagan years and are slowly dying off. Two of the burners on my stove died last year, and I sort of have to kick the bottom of the fridge door to get it to shut completely.

For this lesson, I brought along my own cucumbers, but John was a step ahead of me. He brought his own.

“I got started a little early,” he said and showed me a large, clear plastic tub.

On the bottom of the tub were sliced, green cucumber sickles.

“The cucumbers I had were a little too big,” John said. “So, I cut out the centers with the seeds.”

In the pickling brine we were going to use, the seeds would likely detach and cloud the bottle. They also wouldn’t add much to the overall crispness of the pickles.

In this lesson, we were going to make bread and butter pickles, mostly because John preferred them. I was fine with whatever. I have a lot of cucumbers.

John walked me through the steps, first explaining that, to make the pickles crisper, he’d buried the cucumber slices beneath under several inches of ice and some pickling salt. They’d been chilling in the container for hours.

Pickling salt, he added, was important. It’s finer than table salt and isn’t iodized. Iodized salt can give the pickles a weird flavor.

The cucumbers had been sitting in the salt and ice for a couple of hours.

Before I’d arrived, he’d also started his canning bath in a big pot full of water, which was just coming to a boil.

Lids for the jars simmered in a separate pan of water, while the jars rested in the dishwasher. Wisps of steam rose from the closed door.

“A canner’s best friend,” John said. “It sterilizes and heats your jars for you.”

My dishwasher hasn’t worked in years.

John heated a mixture of vinegar, pickling salt, sugar and spices in a separate pot on the stove and brought it to a boil.

After draining the ice from the cucumbers, he added them to the pot and stirred with a wooden spoon.

“You want to use wood, if you can,” he said. Stainless steel was OK, too, but nothing with aluminum. “It can add flavors you don’t want.”

Once the pickles began bubbling, John took jars from the dishwasher and carefully spooned pickles and sauce into them.

“You want about half an inch of head space,” he said and then wiped the lip of the jar with a paper towel.

He wanted the lids to go onto the tops of the jar cleanly.

With a magnet-tipped plastic stick, he fished lids from the pan and gently placed them over the mouth of the jar before capping the lid with a thin, steel ring.

“Just twist it shut,” John said. “Don’t make it tight.”

We filled seven jars and then put them in a wire cage inside the bubbling canning bath. We lowered the cage into the water, and John pointed out the bubbles escaping from the jar. This was air leaving the pickles. When the canning process was completed, it would create a vacuum inside the jar.

“You’re trying to get anything out of the jar that could be a home for bacteria,” he said. “You don’t want anyone to get sick.”

Improperly canned foods can cause upset stomach, loose bowels and even death.

Botulism was the big fear.

“Botox,” John said. “It paralyzes whatever it touches. Doctors use it to paralyze nerves to remove lines on your face, but if you eat it, well … bad stuff.”

It was less of a risk with some kinds of canning, like pickles, fruit and jam. The acid of the vinegar in pickled foods discourages bacteria and sugar is a preservative.

“It used to be tomatoes were fine to can,” he said. “But so many people are growing low-acid tomatoes now that often you have to add some sort of acid to them.”

Most garden vegetables, like green beans, potatoes and meat should only be canned using a pressure canner, which heats the contents of the jars hot enough to kill bacteria. But there are also other foods that shouldn’t be canned even using a standard pressure cooker — like squash and pumpkin.

“It’s not safe,” John said.

After 10 minutes in the water, John and I removed the jars and placed them on a towel to cool and dry, explaining that hot jars might cool too fast on the cool, bare surface and break.

“They’re pretty tough jars,” he said. “But it could get messy.”

As we waited, the lids sealed over the jars with a popping noise.

“You can tell they’re sealed if you can see a slight indentation in the middle,” John said.

If the jars don’t seal, he said, you should reprocess the pickles, put them back in the canning bath and try again or you just let them cool and put the pickles in your fridge.

“You eat them like ice box pickles,” he said. “You just need to finish them up within a week or two.”

John offered me half of the pickles we (mostly he) made and gave me a copy of “So Easy to Preserve” to be my guide.

“We sell them here at cost for $15,” he said.

It seemed easy. So I bought some jars and washed a couple of pounds of cucumbers from my garden.

Here’s a great recipe for Bread and Butter Pickle Slices

Reach Bill Lynch at lynch@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5195 or follow @LostHwys on Twitter.

Follow Bill’s One Month at a Time progress on his blog at blogs.wvgazettemail.com/onemonth/.