Bunchberries: Useful or Useless?

The research we had done on bunchberries showed only that they have a very high amount of natural pectin and very little water and taste of their own.  We found a small handful of recipes, mostly for raspberry bunchberry syrup and not much else.

However, we didn't want to just take everyone else's word for it, so we took a small amount of berries and cooked them down.

For something so bright red and sometimes almost orange, this was not quite the color we were expecting.  Also, they really do have very little flavor of their own.  My husband added some honey to it, but all that really did was make it taste like honey.

After this confirmation, we have been trying to decide what to do with the gallons of bunchberries we still have sitting in our garage.  We know they're good to use as natural pectin in jams and jellies as they carry the flavors of other fruits well--because they don't have their own flavor to speak of.

To try to find more about using them as pectin, I found this blog, Bunchberry Farm.  Jasmine has helped give me a little guidance as to how to use them as pectin, but mostly we'll be guessing and checking.  Our biggest problem right now is the lack of all our handy dandy kitchen gadgets to assist with extracting seeds and crushing them up.  As you can see in the picture, they actually hold their form fairly well.

We're still trying to decided, since we are very short on freezer storage space, whether to keep what we harvested or not.  I really hate to throw away something that is not totally useless and that we spent 45 minutes out in the cold rain gathering, but we might since they aren't exceptionally useful and we are so low on space right now.

The most useful thing that came out of harvesting all these bunchberries?  When we first found them last weekend, we were on a hunt for crowberries to harvest.  What we realized very quickly as we started raking in the bunchberries this Saturday was that they were entirely surrounded by blueberries--lots and lots of blueberries!  Now, right now is not a good time for blueberries, so the plants were not very fruitful.  However, there were many plants that both of us saw that still had quite a few blueberries still hanging on, meaning they had not been picked clean by someone.

In short, thanks to going back for the bunchberries caused us to realize that we had found our blueberry patch for next year.  That made it all worth it.  And it is most definitely staying an undisclosed location!

Bunches and Bunches of Berries

Last weekend when we were out scouting good berry locations in the area, we found these very plentiful berries but we had no idea if they were edible or not.

After asking a few people whether they knew what they were and whether they were edible, I went searching online and quickly found that they are--surprise, surprise--bunchberries!  The plant is commonly known as a dwarf dogwood.  The berries are edible but there is not a lot of information out there about how to use them.

Once we knew this and where to gather gallons of them quickly, we planned to revisit this location and pick a whole bunch.  What better time to go pick them than a cold, rainy day like today?  With two berry rakes and lots of containers, we managed to harvest several gallons in around an hour.

Due to the rain and all the leaves we raked up with them, I decided it would be easier to lay them all out to dry before trying to get the chaff out, which is best done with most berries by rolling them down a dry towel-covered board.

The next question is: what do we do with all these berries now?

While we wait for the berries to dry, enjoy one of our lovely views from today:

Undisclosed berry-picking location