Recipe-Blogging: Wineberry Saffron Sorbet
Traditionally, the Fourth of July is when the wild wineberry and blackberry vines (mostly wineberries, which are a bit of a controversial topic, it would seem) in the woods behind my house start to enter their peak picking season, and this year has been no exception, as I’ve picked close to a gallon of berries so far, with plenty more to come.* Wineberries, for the uninitiated, taste quite a bit like raspberries, except with some extra tartness. My favorite thing to do with the wineberries I pick is to use them in a sorbet, the recipe for which is below and which is inspired by a recipe I found in this book. Sometimes I’ll add some blackberries to the sorbet, depending on how many I’ve been able to pick, and if you have no wineberries near you, this is no less delicious with just about any other berry.
Ingredients and Equipment:
1 quart wineberries
1 4-year old child (optional)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
small to medium-sized pinch of saffron,** finely ground with a mortar and pestle
Food mill
Ice cream maker
Directions: Using the food mill and the labor of the 4-year old child, juice and seed the berries, which should result in about a cup of berry juice. This is a most mundane, tiring, and labor-intensive process for an adult, and it is recommended that adults undertake this task only if no small children are available; by contrast, small children, who have the energy of several thousand suns and a completely warped sense of “enjoyable,” find the process interesting and fun, and the labor they expend helps reduce their energy levels to the point where they may even be willing to accept the notion that they should go to sleep.
Meanwhile, bring the water to a boil, and then dissolve the sugar into the water to make a simple syrup. Once the sugar has dissolved, stir in the ground saffron and remove from heat.
Combine the berry juice and the simple syrup, and pour into the ice cream maker. Let the ice cream maker run for about 20 minutes. Place the resulting sorbet in an appropriately sized container and freeze until ready to eat. If you wish, top with toasted pine nuts for an added dimension.
*Before anyone complains about the morality of promoting an invasive species such as the wineberry, it seems worth emphasizing that it’s probably not a wise idea to actually try to cultivate wineberries by planting them.
**A pinch of more than perhaps 8-10 saffron threads will likely overwhelm the wineberries.
WOW, this is amazing.
If we wer in the West coast and had never head of and could not access wineberries, could you recommend a substitute? Would marionberries work?Report
Basic, cultivated raspberries of any sort would give a pretty similar taste, though I suspect you’d want to use a slightly larger pinch of saffron since the raspberry will have a somewhat more powerful taste than a wineberry. I confess that I’m not familiar enough with the sorts of wild berries out in the West to have a good suggestion, though with the way wineberry vines have been spreading, I suspect that if you wait a few years, you’ll find plenty of them available.
The original recipe from which this is derived uses blackberries, which I find have a pretty similar degree of tartness, and the sorbet comes out tasting reasonably similar to this, though again you probably want to use a slightly larger pinch of saffron (maybe 10-12 threads?) if you want the saffron part of the recipe to really come through. Of course, if you really want to emphasize the berry flavor and have just a hint of saffron-iness to it, you can always keep the pinch pretty small.Report
blackberries it is.Report
By the way Himalayan Blackberries, which are found EVERYWHERE in the Pacific Northwest are (as the name suggests) also invasive. And in taking over forests, roadsides, and even every stray patch of dirt in urban areas. And among other things choke out all kinds of natives including actual native blackberry species.
So I wouldn’t bet on wine berries in a straight up knockdown death cage Himalaya vs Wineberry. In Western Washington you literally have to use heavy mowers just to see what kind of raw land you have. Because anywhere you have a combination of sun and dirt you will have blackberries (a similar situation in Northern California is invasive Scotch Broom. Which is pretty at times but is damn useless for pies or really anything but spiking pollen counts. Whereas Himalayans are an ecological menace that are nonetheless some fine eating)Report
A grace note. Trying to control Himalayans is tough, dirty and painful work. Because the spines are nasty and they grow thick. If you are human anyway it mostly takes power machinery (because herbicides that would kill blackberries would kill most everything). On the other hand the vines are like candy to goats. Literally, they start at the tip and munch their way happily up the stems right to the root. As if it were a blackberry licorice stick. And goats’ mouths are incredibly tough. In Washington people are beginning to make pretty good money just trucking their goats from roadside patch to field. Which the goats seem to regard as the equivalent of your 4 year old on a field trip to Willy Wonka’s factory (with less bouncing off walls–but the goats seem happy enough munching away)Report
Wish I’d had goats when I lived in Oregon, but they weren’t allowed inside the Eugene city limits. I spent three years digging blackberries out by the roots in an umowable section of my yard, and when I moved out they were still springing up come March.Report
Oh, Tod, you’ll never find blackberries in Oregon!Report
“…small children, who have … a completely warped sense of “enjoyable”…”
“Clean up your room!”
[Blank stare… continues playing]
“Bet you can’t clean up more than I do!”
[Furious cleaning]
The sad thing is, you could remove “small children” and insert “Kazzy” and that entire sentence (not just the quoted sentence) remains true. It is why I do so well with the lil’uns. And why my wife rues inclement weather that keeps us indoors and me bouncing off the walls like a drugged up puppy.Report
I used to manage a guy who had a miserable personality and a worse attitude. If I asked him to do A, he’d do Z, just to prove how wrong I was to think A was the right way to go. And he’d only do the interesting parts of Z, so someone else would have to finish the implementation. The only way I ever found to motivate him was to outline a problem and imply that I wasn’t smart enough to solve it myself. He’d have a complete solution (complete with superior smirk) the next day.Report
If I did not have access to child labor would pureeing the berries work? Maybe a puree-and-strain?
I ask because this this going to be made (with blackberries most likely) at ches Lookout in the near future.Report
According to The Wife, a puree and strain would work. A strain would definitely be necessary, possible a couple of strains, just because the seeds on blackberries are pretty hard (this is also true of wineberries, but the child labor-run food mill does a pretty good job of straining).Report