Well, it’s wineberry season, suddenly, once again and undeniably!
They’re getting fat on the vines, and redder by the day.
Sunday morning, Mr. Green Scene made some excellent buttermilk pancakes with wineberries and chopped pecans. I’d probably put some on my cereal too if I didn’t already have blueberries in the house from the farmer’s market. Tonight we added them to a salad with goat cheese, as you’d do with raspberries.
However, their extreme deliciousness in the pancakes made me think that their ultimate ambition as a fruit is probably to be eaten warm, inside some kind of carb-rich breakfast or dessert. Thus I am considering just freezing all the wineberries I can pick, in amounts that are sized for batches of muffin and pancake batter. Mmmmmmm.
The other option, which I’ve exercised several years in the past, is to make them into jam. I’ve always used the basic 1:1 recipe–that’s equal amounts berries and sugar. (Same goes for raspberry jam, blackberry, strawberry, etc.) Needless to say, such a spread is not the healthiest thing in the larder.
I read that it’s safe to decrease the amount of sugar in a jam recipe (or substitute honey)–certainly worth a try. I can always taste while it’s cooking. Say it again: Mmmmmm.
One other tip if you’re going to make wineberry jam: It’s worth straining out the seeds with cheesecloth before you seal it in jars. Seeds are the wineberry’s main disadvantage compared to raspberries.
What do you do with wineberries?