Strawberry recipes Patch#

Both gardeners and growers like it as the berries are juicy, well flavoured and disease-resistant. Honeyedness is cut with acidity, and there’s a touch of pine. One of the best-loved varieties in the country. It’s juicy as well as sweet and fruits in June-July. Aliceīred in East Malling, at the horticultural research centre where many British strawberry varieties were born.

It’s a big cropper and formidably disease-resistant.

Florenceįlorence strawberries – with their sweet flavour and deep colour – are gorgeous. Regarded as one of the best ‘all-round’ varieties, it’s sweet, bright red and a good cropper. It tastes like the strawberries we all claim to remember. The last time I visited a PYO farm it was one of my favourites. HoneoyeĪn early variety which is ripe, given enough sun, from June. The yield, compared with modern varieties, is low, and the fruit is soft, which is why we don’t see them more often. It has a heavenly floral scent and flavour. GariguetteĪ French variety and a great favourite with chefs. It’s a good idea to contact pick-your-own (PYO) farms to see what they have before you plan a trip. These will ripen in different months, so won’t all be available at the same time. Strawberry varieties to buy during summer 2022 These dishes, though, should only be made once you’ve had your fill of strawberries and cream. This summer I’ve gone all out there’s no Eton Mess here. Passion fruit is knockout with them – my preferred Eton Mess is made with passion fruit and strawberries – and lime squeezed over sweet ripe strawberries provides what you get in the best tomatoes, sweetness with a lick of acidity. ‘Strawberries with lime and coconut,’ I would mutter to myself, ‘I don’t think so.’īut strawberries benefit from acidic partners, as long as they themselves are sweet. Mangoes, lime leaves, coconut, lemongrass – they were all smooching with strawberries. They were fond of pairing strawberries with the Asian ingredients that were easy to get hold of, at least in Sydney. This is just the cook in me, wanting to try the unexpected, the new.įor years I bought an Australian food magazine called Gourmet Traveller. Now that I’ve told you strawberries are best eaten in the simplest way, I’m going to backtrack by the middle of the season I wrack my brain for new things to do with them. You can still track down good strawberries (at farm shops and pick-your-own farms) and occasionally one of the supermarkets decides to stock a beautifully flavoured variety, such as Gariguette. The strawberries he sold were at the peak of both ripeness and sweetness. It’s become a cliché that strawberries don’t taste as good as they once did, but when you bought them from roadside stalls the seller didn’t have to think about shelf life. You didn’t want anything fancy with the first strawberries just cream and – once I’d had it in a Scottish guest house there was no going back – a dusting of icing sugar from a special glass shaker. Our car smelt of strawberries and suntan lotion all summer. If you got a trip to the sea, a strawberry mivvi and a punnet of strawberries on the same day, you had everything. You had to be alert to spot the stalls and then ask for them in the right way (not shoutily or greedily). Picking up cardboard punnets from roadside stalls was a huge treat. I lay down at the edge of the bed and breathed in years of summers. The most intense strawberry experience I could get, without picking and eating them, was to smell them. The berries were red with green-tinged shoulders by the calyx.

Strawberry recipes Patch#

I’d never seen them growing before and was as enchanted as I would have been on finding a patch of pumpkins already transformed into carriages. He had planted a huge bed of strawberries. I knew that I’d be in big trouble if I was discovered – Mr Matthews could set his constantly dribbling hound, Boris, on me – but curiosity won the day and I climbed over the sagging part of the fence to check under the leaves. I noticed, spying by the fence one day, flashes of red in the bed that lay alongside. I felt there were things I wasn’t supposed to see nothing sinister, maybe just flowers with tiny jewels among their stamens. We couldn’t run freely around his garden. Mr Matthews, on the other side, was gruff. I loved the grey ones that felt like rabbit’s ears. Mrs Clark, her hair escaping from her hastily arranged bun, showed us the most tactile flowers she grew. Both neighbours were elderly and kept beautiful gardens. We did have neighbours, so the new place wasn’t totally isolated, but the area was quite cut off. It was the end of rockpools, ice-cream parlours and paper bags of dried seaweed – dulse – to eat while walking along the prom. We moved from a small seaside town to the countryside when I was nine.