As for the rest – for “part two” is all about remainders – many berries were carefully prepared to ride out the Fall and Winter in the freezer, some berries met their end in the dehydrator, others are being made into fruity wines.

To freeze fruit is to limit its potential usefulness later on, which I find difficult. When dealing with seasonal, highly perishable berries, however, I think it’s a must. Your berries, especially the raspberries, black berries and the like, will never come out of the freezer in nearly as nice a conditon as they went in – you can only have fresh berries for a few moments, you see. The formation and later melting of ice crystals destroys the structure of the berry. Once you’ve defrosted, the best you can hope for is a floppy, slightly waterlogged raspberry. I do not mean to suggest that freezing berries is not worthwhile, only that one ought to be aware of the unavoidable degradation in quality at the other end. Previously frozen berries are great for baking into muffins, scones, pancakes and waffles. They as positively indispensable in smoothie-making and make pleasant additions to certain warm-weather cocktails (perhaps in the place of ice cubes?).
The manner in which you will freeze your berries depends on projected future use.


The current (July/August 2007) issue of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine features a double-page, nearly exhaustive article all about How to Freeze Summer Produce. They believe that the best way to freeze fresh berries is in sugar or sugar syrup because both inhibit ice crystal formation. I have attempted neither technique, my primary objection being that I do not want to douse my fruit in sugar. I suppose that I could rinse them once they’ve defrosted, but since my method works just fine for me, I’ve stuck with it. Plus, it’s much simpler. I do just this:

1. Clear space in the freezer for a cookie sheet – preferably the kind with a lip around the edge to prevent spill – and for whatever containers you’ll eventually use to store your frozen berries. Real estate in my freezer is very tight so for me, this was the hardest part.
2. Pick over your berries. Use the already-smushed ones for jam, puree, cobbler, or sauce. Compost the moldy ones and those yet unripe.
3. Arrange berries on your cookie sheet in single layer and place in the freezer. The cooler your berries are when you freeze them, the less condensation and ice will form on the outside. If you’ve gone u-picking on a warm day, it’s best to wait until your stash is at least down to room temperature before putting them to freeze.
4. Once your berries are fairly solidly frozen on the cookie sheet, toss them into a heavy duty freezer bag (or some other preferred storage container), label and date, and shelve.

According to Cook’s Illustrated, zero degrees (or below) is an optimal temperature for your home freezer. Airflow, too, is very important. The more air you have moving around your product, the more quickly it will cool and the less damage it will sustain when defrosting.

The bulk of my frozen berries I left in whole-berry form as I suspect they are safest that way. I did, as an experiment, make some raw raspberry puree which I froze flat in a quart-sized heavy duty plastic bag. Now I have a thin little raspberry brick standing in my freezer, hardly taking up any space at all. I suspect it will be very delicious swirled into some wintertime oatmeal, or added to a smoothie, or made into sauce for ice cream.

The last method I employed in preserving the fruit whole was dehydration. Again, it is important to think about what you have in mind for your fruit down the road, and pick a method that is in line with those ends. I chose to dry my left over cobbler cherries because I absolutely love cooking with dried cherries, perhaps more so than with fresh ones. Dried cherries go just about anywhere a dried cranberry can – sprinkled over my salad, baked into cornmeal cookies, cooked down to fill a bar cookie. I bought my food dehydrator – a magic chef or something – on eBay for about seven bucks. It’s the basic home-use model: round, six trays, a lid and a fan at the bottom that circulates warm air throughout. Much, much fancier models exist, but this one suits my purposes adequately.

I washed, dried, halved and pitted my cherries before laying them out in a single layer in the machine. They took, with only minimal babysitting and one shuffle, about two days to dry. So long as they are stored in an airtight container, I see no reason why they would ever spoil, but I doubt they will survive the year before being devoured. There will be more cherries in a mere eleven months, after all.

I could not resist the siren call of strawberry wine. I made raspberry also. I am a wine novice. I own one how-to book and one recipe book, both of which I have only skimmed. I understand the basic principles and techniques, I think, but am ignorant of the subtleties. I know that there is a way to check the sugar and alcohol content – I may even own the tool for it. I also know there is a way to kill the yeast before bottling to make sure that corked bottles do not explode in my basement. I do not do any of these things in my winemaking, however. I seem, uncharacteristically, to lack some measure of fear or respect that might prevent me from doing such an incomplete job of it. Yet despite my failure to compulsively and exhaustively follow the recipe’s instructions, my first three batches of wine seem to have been reasonably successful. Two – the apple and strawberry – have been bottled, and the raspberry, bulk-aging in my linen closet, was even perfectly drinkable a mere month after it was born.

I will not herein attempt to explain home winemaking. I will say that, the way I have done it anyway, each step is simple and if you have a good chunk of time and don’t mind smelling a bit like cheap hooch once in a while (when racking or bottling, say), nothing should get in your way. All of my equipment and specialty ingredients – food-grade buckets, gallon jugs, rubber bungs, airlocks, a giant funnel, yeast and yeast nutrient, acid blends, corks and a corker – ran a little under a hundred dollars, though I am sure you could acquire all for less.
And while I wait for my closet-wine, I have even begun to dabble in flavored vodkas as well. Dreaming still of the Vault’s habanero “martini,” I have dried three of said peppers and tossed them into a vodka bottle to steep, quite unsure of what will come out the other end. With the remainder of the spirit, I’ve attempted a blueberry vodka (presently submerged with a vanilla bean and lemon juice, the alcohol in the liquor slowly leeching all of the berry’s beautiful color away) and a strawberry-and-vanilla fortified wine (strawberries, vanilla, white wine, sugar, and vodka). All of these I plan to let sit for one month and then taste.
For a more comprehensive – yet totally accessible – introduction to making wine at home, please check out Julia Brews & Julia’s Brews.

     In an undergraduate class at Portland State, straightforwardly titled Persuasion, I formally learned that scarcity makes things more desirable: eclipses of the sun and moon, real Love, Mason Jennings’ acoustic album, Simple Life. For me, more pressing than astronomical events eternally playing hard-to-get, however, are the Fruits of Summer: the berries, the stone fruits, the figs (oh, Lord, the figs). Remember how all of this wonderful produce we love to munch year-round actually has growing seasons? Maybe you can get overpriced, under-ripe strawberries in May, but they’re not worth it. They are only placeholders for summer strawberries. Those out-of-season imposters are white in the middle, unripe, and juiceless. They have no scent and do not yield to the teeth. They look enough like a strawberry to jog something in your brain, maybe fooling your palate into thinking that you’re ingesting the real thing, but you’re not. They are a sad waste of resources. Therefore, in my life as a cook and eater I have resolved to eat what’s in season – as best as I am able (I am powerless for the rest of the day without my apple in the morning, I’m afraid) – and then move on as the weeks roll by. Accordingly, lately I have been gorging myself on summer berries.
     I’ve made two trips to Sauvie Island, where the nearest U-Pick farms are around here, and come home with around fifty-five pounds of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, marionberries and cherries. The night I brought my first batch home (which was followed by a flurry of processing, though I did not get through the whole lot right away) I had nightmares – proper nightmares with screaming and everything – about not getting to my loot fast enough and letting some of them go moldy. My concern in the dream wasn’t so much that I had lost money or missed out on eating those delicious gems, but more so that I had allowed something intrinsically valuable go to waste, that I was responsible for the mishandling of an important gift. In my dream I heard myself say, Oh, I was such a fool to have taken so many when there are others who would have used them up. This is really how I talk in my dreams sometimes.
     I did not, in reality, lose a single berry to the Musty Fuzz. Rather, I have taken my treasure, washed and dried, chopped and mashed, boiled, dehydrated, canned, and bagged and turned my sixty-plus dollar investment into small jars and bottles of priceless, distilled Summer.
     Project, First: Jam. I have some very strong feelings about jam, and these I shall presently share.

• 1. Jam should taste like the fruit from which it is made.
• 2. Jam should be strong enough to hang together on a piece of toast, but should not at all remind one of gelatinous substances such as flan or Jell-O.
• 3. The purists use all sugar and no pectin when making jam, which requires a whole heck of a lot of sugar and a great deal of heat. Made this way, the jam’s more sugar than it is fruit. I prefer a little bit of pectin and a whole lot less sugar.
• 4. Jam should not have too much junk in it. It is tempting, I know, to want to add ginger and vanilla and raisins and walnuts and wine and SweetTarts to give your jam a signature flair. Of course, there are exceptions to this persnickitiness (red wine with strawberries, for example; and toasted, ground walnuts with figs), but generally I very firmly believe the simple and plain is best. Go figure.

     I have thus far made two batches of raspberry jam, blueberry, strawberry, drunken strawberry, blueberry, marionberry and a rasp-marion mix. The recipe, included in the Pomona’s Pectin box, is roughly four cups of mashed berries, between two and four teaspoons of pectin, some calcium water (to activate the pectin) and between three-quarters and two cups of white sugar. The pectin makes it easy to gel, and home canning isn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.
     Project, Second: after the jam came a cobbler or two. I’m not sure what’s tastier than baked fruit topped with a sweet biscuit. As far as I can tell, the cobbler camp divides into those who would cook the biscuits separately, and those who would cook the biscuits with the fruit. I grew up in a house that believed in baking the biscuits with the fruit, spreading the eventual topping on the bottom of the baking dish, pouring the fruit mixture over, and letting the cakey biscuits rise to the top in the oven. The other method, with which I have only recently begun experimenting, is to par-cook the two components separately – fruit on the stove and biscuits in the oven – and unite them only in the dish’s final minutes in the oven.

Berry Cobbler, two ways
Upside-down Method

ingredients:
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons (2 ounces) salted butter
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 1/2 cups stewed berries with juice*

procedure:

• 1. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
• 2. Cream 1/2 cup sugar and butter until smooth and fluffy.
• 3. Stir in sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk.
• 4. Pour batter into prepared pie tin or casserole dish.
• 5. Put drained berries over batter.
• 6. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 cup sugar over.
• 7. Pour 1 cup berry juice over all.
• 8. Bake 45 minutes @ 375ºF, until topping is golden and edges are browned.

Serves six.

**Stewed berries = fresh or frozen berries + desired amount of sugar + flavorings (also as desired: vanilla, wine, ginger…). Heat until berries are just cooked. Simple as that.

Separate Biscuit Method
Biscuit recipe borrowed from The America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook

ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into half-inch cubes
1 cup buttermilk

Stewed berries, as in above recipe. Cook longer for this recipe, allowing the liquid to thicken a bit. You may choose to add some cornstarch.

procedure:

• 1. Preheat oven to 425ºF.
• 2. Prepare baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat mat.
• 3. In the workbowl of a food processor, fitted with the metal blade, combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Pulse to combine.
• 4. Sprinkle butter cubes over and process until the mixture resembles a coarse meal.
• 5. Transfer to a medium-sized bowl, add buttermilk, and toss (with your fingers or a rubber spatula) to combine.
• 6. Scoop batter (with a measuring cup, ice cream scoop, large spoon) onto baking sheet. The original recipe says 1 1/2″ ice cream scoop will yield 12 biscuits.
• 7. Bake until lightly browned on tops and bottoms, about fifteen minutes. Do not turn the oven off.
• 8. Put filling into your pie tin or casserole and arrange par-baked biscuits over.
• 9. Bake the whole lot for about ten minutes, until the biscuits are a deep golden brown.

     While I am not a convert over to the separate biscuit camp, I think my loyalty comes from time and conditioning rather than thinking that one method is intrinsically superior to the other. I have been an upside-downer all my life and to make such a drastic change in my cobbler consumption twenty-something years in might just be too big a shift for this old gal. Try both – goodness knows there’s enough fruit around – and tell me what you think.

     Hang around for Red, part two, in which I shall discuss freezing, drying, snacking, and winemaking.