Bonding with blueberries
Relationship with blue-hued berries hangs on taste, texture
Summer after summer, I have been trying to bond with fresh blueberries but it has not come to fruition.
This is not for a lack of trying. I have traveled miles to find different varieties of blueberries (wild, ‘Spartan,’ ‘Bluecrop,’ ‘ Chandler’), sampled ones from farm stands and those that come with carbon footprints, analyzed the size and popped in small, medium-sized and big ones. But I still don’t really “get” them. When ripe, I find them to be squishy, not juicy; and flavorless, not sweet or tart.
Just to be clear, it’s not like I hate them but I don’t love them either. It’s more like I don’t understand their mere existence. In a summer fruit salad, amid the melons, strawberries, grapes and bananas, I won’t pick them out and toss them, but if they were MIA, I certainly would not miss them. And in a parfait, if the granola is nutty and crunchy and the tangy yogurt creamy, the blueberries get outplayed in taste and texture. So why add them at all?
I know, I know, blueberries are considered the king of antioxidants, packed with vitamins C& K, low in calories and known to lower blood pressure. Much as I am mindful of what I eat, I like fruits that are assertive and have some brass, shall we say, and that’s where blueberries let me down.
They are like the letter “x.” You see, if ‘x’ were excluded from the English alphabet, I would not miss it. At the end of a typical workday if I were to count the number of words beginning with “x” that I read or uttered, it would be somewhere between none and one. I seldom have the need to mention Xray or xylophone, and I don’t address the printer by its brand name.
Likewise, blueberries to me are just there, sucking up oxygen. When I dissect their taste and texture — they are just blah. Their sweetness does not stand out and so it would help if they were somewhat tart. But nope, they lack that, too. There’s nothing in their texture either. By the time you take the first chew, you are done with the fruit and so you move on to the next berry and the next and the next until you realize you have given your mouth a workout for nothing except to have stained teeth and a purplish tongue. I’m not even going get into fruity aromas because they have none.
Even though I would like them to have more chutzpah as fresh fruits, I would give plenty of fist bumps to baked goods with blueberries. The berries have a wonderful temperament toward high heat, softening well when baked but yet hanging on to their shape. Also, cakes, bars, breads and muffins look visually stunning studded with blue polka dots.
When it comes to adding blueberries to a cake or bread batter, keep some basic tips in mind: Freeze the fresh berries before
adding them to the batter to avoid staining the sugaregg-butter-flour mixture to an unappealing blue. Also, it pays to toss the berries with flour before adding them to the batter so that they won’t sink to the bottom of the muffin or cake.
Speaking of freezing, don’t wash the berries before freezing them because when they are wet, they will stick together and get icy.
In pies, the blueberry filling needs some TLC especially when the berries are ripe. Thickeners such as cornstarch and flour could mute the fresh fruit flavor, and simmering the berries to reduce the excess liquid could mean once again muffling the fresh flavor. One way to get the filling to have a jam-like consistency is to use commercial pectin or add grated apple, which contains a lot of natural pectin.
A couple of weekends ago, I went to Trax Farms in Finleyville to pick the ‘Bluecrop’ variety. The fruits were at their peak, and plump by blueberry standards. Having spent an hour picking them, I was pleased that the fruits of my labor yielded more than half a basket. I shared some with my mentee, Fitale Wari, had some for breakfast and ate some more to work on my bonding.
I didn’t make much headway and resorted to what I typically do — use them in appealing blueberry recipes. I didn’t feel the time was ripe to write an ode to the fresh fruits. However, Ms. Wari was. She sent me a thankyou email saying: “The x’s, aka blueberries, didn’t last the week. They were TOO good.”