I you didn’t know, Firehouse Subs sells their empty pickle buckets for (as of today) $3 with a lid. Compared to Home Depot or Lowe’s buckets, that’s a very attractive price, and if you’re going to use them for carrying concrete or shoveling ashes, they are ideal. However, if you wanted buckets for food storage or other similar purposes, the smell of those pickles is absolutely overpowering and will permeate a steel can of SPAM within a week. I carried a couple of buckets home in the trunk of my car, and they didn’t turn over or anything, but the odor of those pickles was still present in my car a week after I had gotten home and taken them out.

Since then, I searched the Internet for ways to remove that pickle smell. I won’t go into all of the suggestions I saw, because you can Duck-Duck-Go them just as easily as I did. I will, however, tell you that none of them worked. Letting new coffee grounds sit in the buckets for a few days seemed to be the most recommended, but it didn’t work for me. I have a bucket sitting on my deck now with about a pound of Community Coffee inside that has been waiting there for a month, and while the smell of coffee is present, it is still overpowered by the stench of those pickles.

I also tried washing out a bucket with acetone. Acetone, I figured, will remove just about anything from anything else, but it didn’t work. I washed out the interior with denatured alcohol and let it sit for two days. Denatured alcohol has a pretty strong smell of its own, but it was struggling against the pickle smell and losing. For good measure, I sloshed the alcohol around the interior and then lit it on fire. After the alcohol burned away…yep, still pickle stench.

Finally I found a sure-fire method that works! Put the bucket in a wide open space clear of grass, dried leaves or other debris and at least 15 or 20 feet away from any structure. Pour a pint or so of gasoline into the bucket. Stand well back and toss a lit match or burning paper into the bucket. Allow the gasoline to burn until it is consumed and the bucket is a blackened puddle of melted red plastic with a metal handle stuck in it. Allow it to cool completely. (You can spray some water on it to speed up this process, or to stop the process mid-way if something important nearby becomes involved in the procedure. DO NOT spray any water until all of the gasoline has been consumed. If it is necessary to halt the fire before all of the gasoline is gone, use a Class B fire extinguisher.)

When you are done with all of this, the cooled slab of plastic will still smell like pickles. Place it in a suitable trash container and dispose of properly.