> FRESH BITES
In-season blueberries go beautifully with breakfast, in a salad, as part of a sweet dessert, or infused into an ice-cold beer
Prepare to go wild Sunday at the sixth annual wild blueberry festival at Evergreen Brick Works.
And come hungry, so you can taste the more than 30 blueberry-laden sweets and savouries for sale and vote with your taste buds for the best wild blue pie.
Along with the familiar pies, jam and muffins, you’ll find wild-blueberry-infused beer and kombucha fermented tea. The juicy berries also star in cinnamon tamales, laddus from India, ice pops, soup, wild boar sausages and much more.
At the tasting table, try wild and cultivated berries, then take home a pint of your favourite to sprinkle over breakfast and salads, cook into a barbecue sauce or bake into dessert.
Festival regular Laura Sabourin, owner of Feast of Fields organic farm near Jordan, Ont., in Niagara, says there are four types of blueberries:
Wild lowbush blueberries, which Sabourin brings to local farmers’ markets, grow on scrubby little plants in the Northern Ontario woods in an arc around Sudbury. Indigenous people harvest them with hand-held rakes, a back-breaking job, then transport them from 10 minutes to two hours to the nearest road for collection.
“Tame” wild blueberries grow on the same low bushes throughout the Maritimes. They’re managed, mechanically harvested and graded like a regular crop before being frozen for supermarkets and food processors.
Big fat highbush or cultivated blueberries, which I’ve picked at Wilmot Orchards in Newcastle, are fun to harvest from waist-high (or higher) bushes. They make attractive desserts and are easier for kids to eat.
Sabourin grows certified organic highbush blueberries, but says she sells 100 times more wild Ontario blueberries to people who’ve taken its health benefits to heart and love its full flavour. To your health Besides being low-cal, naturally sweet and a good source of vitamin C and fibre, blueberries get their deep blue skin colour from anthocyanins, a powerful antioxidant credited with amazing feats, from potentially preventing cancer and protecting our hearts to slowing down memory loss as we age.
Since tiny wild blueberries contain more skin to pulp than their cultivated cousins, they’re touted as providing even more antioxidant power. “Who knew what an ORAC (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) score was five years ago?” asks Sabourin, referring to the test measuring the antioxidant capacity of foods. World famous Whether cultivated or wild, Canadian blueberries are enjoyed around the world. British Columbia’s summer harvest of nearly 68 million kilograms makes Canada the world’s third largest highbush blueberry producer.
In Nova Scotia, where harvesting has just begun, producers harvested a record 28 million kilograms of “managed” wild blueberries last year, said Peter Rideout, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Producers Association of Nova Scotia. East Coast berries are frozen within 24 hours and shipped year-round to 30 countries, from the U.S. to China. Price watch August is normally prime time for fresh wild and cultivated blueberries, but it’s been a tough year for both. A warm, early spring on the West Coast brought on B.C.’s highbush crop early, colliding with U.S. berries and dragging prices down.
In Ontario, a cold spring hurt the highbush crop and severely damaged the wild crop, sending prices soaring. Last week in Toronto, I bought a pint of wild blueberries for $13 and a pint of cultivated berries for $2.50. Take your pick!
Buy & Store
Avoid berries that are damp, squished, wizened or mouldy.
Refrigerate, loosely covered, and use within two weeks. Blueberries freeze well up to a year. To freeze, place in a single layer on a cookie sheet and freeze. Transfer to plastic bags or containers and scoop out as needed.
There’s no need to thaw frozen berries before baking.
Prep
Rinse and drain fresh or frozen blueberries just before use.
For best flavour, bring to room temperature before serving.
Serve
Go traditional, with pie, cobblers, muffins, jam, blueberry pancakes and sauces for meat.
Go modern with smoothies, salads, salsas and pizza.
For dessert, blueberries love peaches and lemon.
Blueberry Superfood Salad
Use wild or cultivated berries for this healthy and refreshing main-course salad, adapted from the BC Blueberry Council.
3 Star Tested 2 cups (500 mL) packed chopped kale, stems removed 11/2 cups (375 mL) blueberries 2/3 cup (180 mL) quinoa, cooked
and cooled 1 cup (250 mL) raw beet, peeled and grated (1 medium) 3 tbsp (45 mL) hemp hearts 1/2 cup (125 mL) l emon f l ax vinaigrette (recipe below) 1/4 cup (60 mL) sunflower seeds Lemon Flax Vinaigrette 3 tbsp (45 mL) lemon juice 1 tsp (5 mL) honey 2tsp (10 mL) finely grated lemon zest 1-1/2 tsp (7 mL) salt 1 tsp (5 mL) freshly ground black
pepper
1/4 tsp (1 mL) turmeric powder
(optional)
1/4 cup (60 mL) flax seed or olive oil For vinaigrette, in a bowl whisk together lemon juice, honey, lemon zest, salt, pepper and turmeric. Slowly drizzle in oil until thick.
For salad, in a bowl combine kale, blueberries, cooled quinoa, grated beet, hemp hearts and vinaigrette. Refrigerate an hour or so to blend flavours. Top with sunflower seeds just before serving.
Makes 4 to 6 servings. Cynthia David is a Toronto food and travel writer who blogs at cynthia-david.com