Pick Your Own (PYO) Fruit, and Blackberry Cordials

For my birthday day, I decided, for reasons I don’t really know why, to go pick apples. Actually, I do know why, it is something we used to do in NY all the time and I missed that about Maryland. In researching all the orchards around town (well, mostly outside of town), we came across Larriland farms, an orchard that actually has many excellent functions, either for kids or people my age. Multiple fields of apples, hay rides, barn house full of country-produced goods and wares, this was exactly the place I wanted to go to. Later in this article I will discuss what I have done with some of the fruits I picked, in turning them into cordials, both blackberry and raspberry cordials.

Larriland farms is a good drive out rt 70 away from Baltimore, so be sure to stock up on dunkin donuts on the way. The farm is rather easy to locate, with a large sign, and cant miss the rows of blackberries on the right and produce on the left! It is advisable, however, to call ahead to make sure the things you want to pick are 1) in season and 2) pickable that day. Sometimes after heavy rains, certain fields are off limits to the trampling masses. Having taken care of this, we arrived, navigated the small dirt roads to the apple orchards first. Each fruit has it’s own little ‘hutch’ nearby, where you can acquire a bag or a container, pick your

Me picking blackberries

goods, then return and pay. The extremely convenient thing about Larriland farms, is that each of these little hutches has…. a credit card machine! This makes it extremely easy to pick an approximate weight of fruit on your part, and not worry about crossing your immediately available cash amount. I personally picked about 15lb of Empire apples, because they have a higher sugar content and are useful in baking apple turnovers, apple pies, etc. Our whole group, totally, picked probably about 40lbs of apples, which sounds like a lot, and it is, but when you start baking the quantity of apples rapidly will vanish!

Next we picked both blackberries (located across the street from the main barn) and raspberries. I have never actually picked berries at a farm before, having only foraged near my parents house while growing up. Even then, the wild raspberries and blackberries are rather small, and way more tart. These commercially produced ones are very large, no thorns on the plants, and tart but definitely sweeter. I picked several pounds each of blackberries and raspberries. With regard to the raspberries, I definitely picked more of the golden or yellow, variety than the usual red. These have a higher sugar content and are just generally sweeter than their red cousins. On the way out, we decided we had to do two things. 1) check the barn for foods that would be appealing (I bought honey from their honey bees) and 2) eat apple fritters. It just so

Eating the Apple Fritters... delicious!

happened that last weekend was the first weekend in their fall festivities, where they have food available on a cookout, but also these fresh apple fritters. Man, these were well worth the trip themselves! The apples were cooked to perfection, not too gooey and soggy with the apple, a nice amount of external breading with crispiness, and a perfect amount of confectionery sugar on top. Delicious, I plan on using my roommate’s deep dryer at some point to try and make my own version of these!

Upon returning home, I froze some of the berries I had picked. They wont last as long as the apples will (which will last a few weeks in the bag, outside the fridge). So, keeping several pounds handy for consumption is nice, and having some frozen is also good. A word of warning though, the best way to freeze fruit like berries is to lay them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet or so, allow several hours to freeze, then put them in a covered, sealed container. When thawed, these will not maintain their texture as well as the fresh ones, but this is not a big concern if you are planning on using them for smoothies, baking, etc. I was going to use them for alcohol, so I was not too concerned either.

It takes a while to decide what to do with all these fruits…. Jelly and/or Jam? Cordials? Sauce for toppings on desserts? Pies? Tarts? So many options exist, it’s difficult to decide. However, I wanted to experiment with

Sterilizing is important!

making cordials, specifically, blackberry cordial and raspberry cordials. The steps are fairly easy, but I really wanted to stress some of the issues with canning and homebrewing here. Sterilization is important!! You may think since you are dealing with alcohol and distilled spirits, that everything will remain fine, but it wont, I promise you. We wont be covering actual canning in this post, but hopefully (If I can find a place to buy the lids) I will shortly. But regardless, you should sterilize whatever container you will be using to hold your foods. I use a sterilizing agent I pick up at the homebrew store, soak them in the sink for about an hour, scrub if necessary. In real canning, everything is sterile the whole way through, but like I said, that is for another time!

In a saucepan, place your berries. I did not make a precise measurements, but I would venture to say about 2, 2.5 cups of whole berries. I used frozen, but fresh would work just as well. I heated it up, thawed the

Berries, frozen and thawing, with Liquors

fruit, mashed them, mixed in sugar, about 3/4 cup of sugar (you can always vary this based on your taste, I eye-balled it and erred on the low side as best I could). Try to mash the fruit a little bit, I used a spoon which i sterilized as well. Also, the pan was sterilized prior to all of this, along with the measuring cup. Everything cleansed and sterile as possible! So basically, mix and heat this to a soup, pour it into the measuring cup and use that to transfer the berry mixture into the containers, being extra careful not to get any on the lid or rim at the top. I filled the two large jars about 1/4 the way with the berry slurry and kept some in the pan still warm, mixed in some honey and then added that to the smaller container. I repeated this procedure (with some cleaning in between) for the raspberries but you can follow this for basically any berry.

Filling the jars with berry sauce and alcohol

Once the berry mixture has cooled slightly, you may add our liquor of choice. In searching the Internet, I could not find any consensus on what to use. Vodka? Cognac? Brandy? The recipes seemed as varied as possible for something so simple. Thus, being the scientist and limited only by graduate student budget and the 6 lids I had for my jars, I made the following mixtures.

• Blackberry with Brandy
• Blackberry with Cognac
• Blackberry with Brandy and Honey
• Raspberry with Brandy
• Raspberry with Cognac
• Raspberry with Cognac and Honey

I realize my experiment is not perfect and there as some groups I did not account for, namely more Honey experimental groups and a vodka group. However, more will be coming if this works out nicely! Fill the jars

Signed, Sealed and ready for storage/shaking

with the liquor of choice, put the lid on, screw on the second lid tight, and be sure to label your jar… I cant tell you how many cases of beer I’ve made where I just don’t remember what’s in them, and a bunch of jars with red berry liquid next to each other would not be easy to tell apart either! For the next 8 weeks, shake the jars about twice a week. After the 8 week period is complete, there will be a straining/filtering process involving cheesecloth and perhaps a few coffee filters. This will get rid of the chunks and provide a nice clear liquor, which I will write up when the time comes.

And that is it! I did not cover anything about the apples yet, as I am still eating them daily and deciding what to make of them. But seriously, this PYO business is fantastic. I fully plan on returning to larriland shortly to pick some of their tomatoes and maybe some more berries before the season ends but I highly recommend you all take a trip, if not there, somewhere else before the harvest season is over. It’s a fun event to do with friends, embrace your inner gatherer part of the hunter/gatherer mentality, and enjoy hand-picked fruit.