Every summer, I venture out to the hedgerow to do some foraging, especially for blackberries. In London, this is not that easy. You have to find a wild patch, non manicured park to find any wild blackberry bushes.
Luckily, I spent a couple of weeks with friends in the country and it was peak blackberry season. I was picking blackberries almost daily and they were big, fat and juicy dark purple berries.
I absolutely loved being the country in the middle of summer where the hedgerows were full of fruit. Along the same hedgerow, I found a couple of walnut trees and some cob nut trees too. For a townie, it was quite exciting.
Foraged blackberries
I ended up with about 1kg of berries and had a choice of what to do with them. One choice is to make an apple and blackberry jam or crumble as we also had lots of apples in the garden. The quickest recipe to make with the most impact is blackberry sorbet.
It takes minutes to just blitz up and a few hours to freeze. With minimal effort, you end up with a vibrant, dark purple fruity sorbet, almost for free. The best thing about this recipe is that you don’t need an ice cream maker. You just need to take the sorbet out after a couple of hours and give it a good mix to break up the ice crystals.
You can follow this recipe and add other berries or flavouring that you like. It was suggested that I make a version that Waitrose was selling, a blackberry sorbet with mascarpone ice cream. I didn’t have all the ingredients to make that so next time.
I like the tart flavours of blackberries but these ones were quite sweet so I added a lot more lemon juice to balance out the sweetness.
Keep aside a handful of berries and freeze them to decorate your sorbet. If you had a lot more berries, you can add them to make a smoothie.
Top tip: you can pick and dry the leaves too as they make good tea.
Put the sugar in a pan with 250ml water and bring to a simmer, stirring occasionally, until all the sugar has dissolved. Set aside to cool completely. Put the blackberries and lemon juice in a small food processor or blender and whizz to a purée (or whizz with a stick blender in a jug), Push through a fine sieve into a mixing bowl using the back of a spoon (discard the seeds). Add the cooled syrup and mix until combined. Freeze overnight until solid.
Easy Blackberry Sorbet Recipe
Ingredients
Instructions
What’s your favourite thing to do with blackberries?
Leave a Reply