Wild Gooseberries – How to Eat Them
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Wild gooseberries are not the friendliest of fruits. I mean look at them! Nasty, spiky, prickly things that will impale your hands without a second thought. You must pick them with gloves or suffer the consequences. These above are Sierra gooseberries from California, but the Eastern wild gooseberry is almost as prickly.
This makes eating wild gooseberries challenging. Bottom line is you need to cook them. That softens the spines and lets you get at the delicious pulp within, which tastes brightly acidic and a little sweet. The aroma is a bit like Sweet Tarts candy.
The best way I’ve found to eat wild gooseberries is to cook them with a little water, smash the berries and strain the spikes out of the resulting pulp. The juice makes an excellent sorbet or syrup to use in cold drinks. It will also make a wonderful jelly. The pulp left behind can, it is said, be used as a pie filling, although I’ve never done that.
You can use this method with domestic, spikeless gooseberries, too.
Makes about a quart
- Wash your berries well and put 8 cups of Sierra gooseberries into a large pot. This seems like a lot, but they are large and very spiky, so they take up more space than other gooseberries. If you have regular gooseberries — wild or domestic — only use 5-6 cups. Barely cover the berries with water, cover the pot and bring to a boil.
- Boil for 2-3 minutes. Turn off the heat and, using a potato masher, crush the berries to a pulp. Do not use a blender, food processor or immersion blender! If you do, you will merely make the nasty spikes smaller and harder to remove later.
- Let this steep, covered, until it gets to room temperature, then pour everything into a container and let it sit overnight in the fridge.
- The next day, fish out any big pieces with a slotted spoon and discard.
- Pour the rest of the gooseberry mixture through a fine-meshed sieve into a quart Mason jar. Let this sit overnight to let the sediment settle.
- The sediment will be tan, the juice varying degrees of red or purple — if you are using ripe gooseberries.
- Gently pour off the juice through a sieve lined with cheesecloth. This will store in the fridge for a week or so, as-is. Or you can heat the gooseberry juice with an equal volume of sugar and make gooseberry syrup. The syrup lasts months in the fridge.
- As for the sediment, taste it. If it is not too gritty, you can mix it with a thickener like tapioca and make it into a pie filling.
