July 27 & 28, 2024

    Saw an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Why America’s Berries Have Never Tasted So Good” and what they went through to make them commercially viable was amazing! Here’s a bit of the story:

“For a bunch of reasons, the sweetest berries were among the least viable commercial berries. They were too soft, too susceptible to disease or their shelf life was too short. They weren’t red enough for consumers or efficient enough for harvesters. Or there weren’t enough of them. Bjorn says there’s a negative correlation between sweetness and yield, which presented a problem that would take Driscoll’s more than a century to solve: Strawberries with more flavor tend to be less abundant.

That is, the most heavenly strawberries weren’t thrown away despite their taste. They were thrown away because of their taste.

“But we got excited about all the varieties that we were throwing away,” Bjorn said, “and we wondered how much consumers would be willing to pay for the best berry they never got to try.” 

It took them decades to develop these berries! Take a look at this https://www.driscolls.com/article/sweetest-batch-raspberries. That’s what we made this batch of sorbet from!

We use the recipe from Cook’s Illustrated July/August 1995, which is the best one we’ve found. It just uses raspberries, sugar, raspberry liquor, water, and lemon juice. 

Here’s the whole mise en place. We print out recipes so we don’t mess up our magazines.