We planted both raspberries and strawberries over the last few years and are getting so many we can’t eat them all. We give them away, but is there something better we can do with them?
Edit: thanks for all the great responses. I think we’re going to freeze them.
Dehydrate them. Dehydrated fruit makes for tasty and healthy snacks.
You can also pulverize them into powder after drying them and make your own sports drink mix!
grind it up fine enough and you could rail or boof it
I’m trying to imagine what a bump of rass would be like. i just… hmm.
could prob boof some blueberries without issue
This is true but less interesting to me because I once had a job in a bakery making blueberry muffins. I had 50 lb bags of frozen blueberries that upon opening, would emit large clouds of blueberry aroma. Day after day, thousands of pounds of blueberries, so much blueberry vapor. I grew to hate the smell. I begged to be put on some other kind of muffin, but nope, I was the youngest and therefore lowest status in the bakery. So I’m not really a fan of blueberries.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
This is true but less interesting to me because…
Soo… how many blueberries would you say you can boof?
I see. Thanks for clarification. I assumed we were talking about snorting lines of powdered fruit. When it comes to putting blueberries into my butthole, I’d say I could manage half a pint, maybe more.
Alternatively brew them into a nice berry wine. You can take this recipe for skeeterpee (it’s fun to say lol) and add the berries in primary fermentation. I’ve got some mixed berry Skeeterpee finishing up right now and it is il really good from the small bit I’ve tasted
We freeze them and give away some
I imagine spicy or sour berry-based sauces could go really well with things from salads to BBQ.
I like berries, especially frozen, in my water or lemonade.
Let neighbourhood kids know they’re welcome to eat from your garden, and you can teach them to weed while you help them pick.
Yeah making jam is quite easy. Basically just add some sugar and pectin and put it on the stove until it’s jam.
Otherwise, put them in the freezer.
Get a tortoise and feed the berries to it 👍
(That’s what we do at our house)
Fruit wine or a melomel.
I used to make raspberry wine. Super easy. Some raspberries, sugar, and yeast. Put it in a barrel, wait a while, get shitfaced.
You can just freeze them for smoothies. Everyone is saying jam and that’s a good idea but it’s a whole process and has to be sanitary. It’s not super hard, obviously, and it’s worth learning how to do but the first time can be a bit daunting and you really have to follow every step. A smoothie is easy.
Another pretty easy thing is to make ice cream and freeze it. A restaurant I cooked at had fig trees that would go nuts once a year and we’d have buckets of figs. We basically made vanilla ice cream and added figs. That was delicious and ice cream obviously freezes well.
Smoothies for sure. Oat milk, banana, and a scoop of peanut butter.
As someone that cans, I’d never suggest a canning option to anyone but someone who has already canned. It’s tiring! It’s hot! It can be sticky!
Amazing end results if you like doing it though!
Raspberry jam is insanely easy to make. Equal weights of fruit and sugar, heat slowly to dissolve the sugar, then boil rapidly for five minutes. Bung in jars and screw the lids on while still hot.
The only sterile part is the jars - I put them in a lowish oven for ten minutes or so after washing them. Lids are washed, dried and swabbed with vinegar.
The sterilization part is what I was concerned about. People who make jam the first time don’t necessarily know how critical that is. You really cannot take shortcuts and be like, “I just washed it. It’s fine.”
Enlists them in the army.
If I had them, I’d process the strawberries by generously cutting the tops off (don’t throw them away!) then putting them on a parchment lined sheet pan to freeze, then once frozen, into freezer safe bags. With the tops, make kvass. Put them in a pitcher with a lot of sugar and some spices, fill the pitcher with boiled and cooled water. Cover loosely with a towel and stir twice a day until fizzy. I have some in my fridge right now and it’s delicious!
On raspberry pi host VPN
On strawberry eat
I have a pretty good canning set up, and strawberry jam is the first recipe in the book.
Food fight!
No such thing
Making jam is not trivial but it I think that makes it rewarding! My dad has made jam and marmalade for as long as I’ve known and it’s always an event. My parents have hundreds of jars (for some reason my dad calls them bottles? Only in a jam context though!) and every so often he cooks up a giant pot of jam with an old-fashioned sugar thermometer, testing the batch on a piece of baking paper, then bottling everything up. He often did it with my sister, who now also makes her own jam.
He labels all the jars, and we’ve opened jars that were… I dunno, a decade old I’m sure, and they were totally fine. So they will definitely keep for a long time!
Making jam is trivial.
You boil the fruit, and if it’s not gummy enough, you add pectin.
Done, jam.
How much sugar do you add?
How long do you boil it for? (You don’t know; you have to monitor the temperature)
How long does putting it all in jars take you? (ages)
It’s not difficult, but it is time consuming and not trivial.
