fresh Blueberry juice

[Art Blade]

during the past days I came across big fat ripe blueberries, sold in small buckets. Those tiny trays with 125g for nearly 2€ are too expensive to experiment with but a 500g bucket for less than 5€ was a no-brainer. I bought three of those during the past days.

I had never worked with blueberries before.

The first time I just mashed them in a blender and wanting to get a clear juice, I used a kitchen strainer hoping to catch all the stuff in it while the clear juice was supposed to go into a carafe. That didn't w0#k as expected. The high content of pectin turned everything into jelly before it had fully passed the strainer. It tasted good anyway but.. not what I had had in mind.

Second attempt.

Sod the drainer, sod juice, go with everything and create a shake.
I used the blender again, added cream, curd and ice cream. Drank half of it, was a really good shake, put the rest in the fridge. When I felt like drinking the rest, perhaps an hour later, everything had turned into something that looked like a spongy foam.. probably the pectin and fruit acid finally won the battle and.. I really didn't even want to taste it. Dang.

Third attempt.

Having learned from the previous attempts, I knew I wouldn't get clear juice and I decided to use ice to slow down the jelly process. I put the berries into the blender, added some sugar, mashed the stuff, added ice cubes, mashed it again. This time the juice was liquid, no jelly, and tasted really great. I decided not to let it turn into jelly so I killed the whole stuff, 4 glasses of fresh, chilled blueberry juice.

Delicious.

So I recommend to only prepare anything with blueberries right before consumption and don't let it sit and turn into something you might not want

[PZ]

Sounds delicious! What exactly is "curd" in context with your juice?

[Art Blade]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product)

some type of white cheese, more like yogurt but a little thicker. I used it for some texture/thickness of the shake.

[BinnZ]

I happen to be very experienced with blueberries. We buy them on the market by the kilo (€5 or €6 a kilo) and usually 'just' eat them raw with a bit of honey, however if you want to make a juice with it here's what you should do:

Put them in a cooking pan and start heating them. No need to add anything, just make sure you keep stirring them to prevent burning. Once they have heated up sufficiently, they will start to dissolve into a dark-red juice. Now, depending on your personal taste, you add sugar and maybe some cornflour. Sugar (or honey) to make it sweat, cornflour to make it creamy. If you don't use cornflour it will be very liquid, if you add some it will be more like a cream. However, what is important during the last few minutes of heating, after you added sugar and cornflour, is to check that there's still some whole berries left. Don't cook them all to *bleep*; it's nicer when there's still some bite in your blueberry cream.
The result, after cooling it, can be used either to put on a pancake or through a milkshake or yoghurt, whatever you like. You can even bake a pie with it, but then you will have to add enough cornflour for it to become creamy, and you want to make sure enough blueberries are still whole. In a pie you want more texture.

Good luck trying that

[Art Blade]

ah that's interesting. Thanks for sharing

Just to explain my first post: The main idea was to keep everything in the fruit "alive," meaning the vitamins (C and K, both of which get destroyed when heated) so I had to go for a cold preparation.

[Art Blade]

Additional info on those vitamins C and K: they've got opposing characteristics regarding what keeps them alive and what doesn't. C can sustain air exposure, K can't. C can't sustain light exposure, K can. None of them can sustain heat exposure.

So "keeping it fresh" means, prepare fruit right before consumption, no heating.

But of course, I like jams and jellies and cakes and whatnot, stuff that requires cooking and baking.. it is all a question of what you want. I just didn't want to chew berries, I wanted to drink them

[Dweller_Benthos]

We always had fresh blueberries from the places around here that grow them, either from the place up the road or my grandfather's farm where they had a dozen or so bushes to pick from for their own use. Anyway, usually they get put up in the freezer, so my favorite way of eating them was to dump a bunch of the frozen ones in a bowl and then cover them with milk and a bit of sugar. Since they are frozen, the milk then freezes around them into almost an ice cream like consistency, and the sugar just adds a bit of sweetness to them as they can be sometimes quite tart. A great dish for a hot summer day.

[PZ]

Sounds like a delicious summer treat, D_B 

We have several blueberry bushes in the garden, and for me it is fun to go out, pick a few to eat on the spot. I like to do the same with cherry tomatoes - taken immediately off the plant, they are even more delicious than when picked and stored. Of course, the experience of eating off the vine is likely contributing to the psychology of the experience.

[Art Blade]

nice little stories