What to Do With Strawberries That Are Slightly Behind the Flowering Period
Collecting strawberries yourself is a dangerous game. What starts with good, clean, fun picking berries from their bushes quickly escalates into a frantic race against everyone on the site to pick the very best and best berries, leaving me with scratched limbs, stained lips and too many berries.
“It’s okay. I love strawberries. I’ll eat them all!” “I’ll make a pie!”
But I don’t make pie. What usually happens is that for the first few days I start eating strawberries at a promising pace. Then I forget about them on the third or fourth day, and the next time I see them when I open the fridge, I say, “Oh yeah, pie,” and then I grab a Diet Coke and close the fridge. and watch Netflix. I repeat this song and dance for a few days until the berries start to look a little worse than worn out.
If you know what I mean. They haven’t gone bad yet – they are still completely edible. They just don’t look attractive. There are soft spots, and they have lost that vibrant ruby look that tempted you to pick so many damn berries in the first place. At this point, some may feel like they’ve failed, as if they’ve wasted the summer’s most valuable possessions. They might be tempted to just throw the berries away and hide their shame, but that would be foolish.
Luckily, there are a few things you can do with a strawberry that has survived better, stronger, more beautiful days and put you back in your rightful place as the bad berry bitch that you really are.
Grind them in sauce
Maceration is simply softening food by soaking it in liquid, but the cool thing about juicy fruits is that they can self- soften with just a spoonful of sugar. Using the power of osmosis – the phenomenon where water molecules move across a semi-permeable membrane from a less concentrated solution to a more concentrated solution to balance the concentration of the solute on either side of the membrane – you can pull water out of the berries by crushing them and stirring them with a little sugar to coat them. …
Leave the sugar-coated berries alone for about half an hour and you have a sweet strawberry sauce, ready for shortbread cookies, ice cream, or as a breakfast carb addition.
Mix them with butter
Complex oils are actually a great vehicle for getting all kinds of bonus products. Herbs, garlic, whatever you need, you can probably turn it into a complex butter, and strawberries are no exception.
Just wash and slice the strawberries, cutting off any really unsightly pieces, and mix them with the following ingredients.
For 1/3 cup of chopped berries you will need:
- 1 stick of room temperature unsalted butter, diced
- 2 tablespoons honey
- Zest of 1 large lemon
- 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
Add everything except the strawberries to a food processor and whisk until smooth and fluffy. Add the strawberries and beat until the butter turns pink but the berry pieces are still visible. Scrape the butter onto a piece of parchment, roll it tightly into a log and chill in the refrigerator until it is firm. Strawberry oil will last a couple of weeks in the fridge or a year in the freezer, but I doubt it will last that long because it is so good for most bread products.
Stir them into a drink
Strawberry makes any drink look more summer, and if it is confused, all cosmetic imperfections are eliminated. Simply rub them on the bottom of your cocktail shaker before preparing the rest of your drink, then shake and strain as usual. This is how they make a real strawberry daiquiri, my friends, without a Jimmy Buffet blender. (You can also mix them and add to lemonade, but I think you will just add booze to this lemonade.)
Freeze them in a jar
The only thing that is more refreshing than the strawberry-flavored liquid is the frozen strawberry-flavored liquid, and the crushed or mashed berries give the fruity fruity taste of a beautiful color and aroma. In fact, if you have enough of them, you won’t even need extra fluid. Simply chop and macerate them as described above, stir and pour into ice cream molds. If you want to pamper yourself with freshness, add a little lime juice and a little zest to it.
Mix them with your morning smoothie
It’s elementary. Just toss the ugly berries in a blender with your regular smoothie (or smoothie bowl ?) For that extra fruity flavor. You can also cut and freeze them in small sachets to make your breakfast easier.
So the next time you find yourself on a strawberry lot (or in a store full of strawberries), feel free to go crazy. Even if you don’t eat them during their peak, there are still tons of delicious ways to eat them all, and by eating berries, you win the summer.