I learned very late in life that fresh blueberries are tart and delicious. The only blueberries I had tasted in my life were cooked, in pie or muffins. And I found them to be completely disgusting, having pretty much nothing to do with anything I considered “fruit” or “berries”. Cooked blueberries have a weird slimy texture and a VERYstrange flavor I can’t even describe, except that it’s unpleasant. And I’ve tried them cooked more than once, so I know it wasn’t just some isolated thing.
Now I happen to have an almost preternatural sense of taste, but this wasn’t some subtle undertone that only I could detect, this was the right up front taste. Every time. it’s like the fresh flavor of blueberries is a tasty normal fruity thing, and the cooked flavor is some freaky polar opposite nasty weird icky completely unrelated thing and no one is noticing but me.
Cooked blueberries are awesome. This just leaves more blueberry pie for the rest of us. The only thing I don’t like is a pre-made pie with overly thick goo holding it all together.
If the pies were thickened with cornstarch (a satanic ritual, if ever there was one), that may account for the gooeyness. Also, if the baker used canned berries, the result isn’t going to be stellar. I just toss them with sugar and let them sit awhile before starting the crust.
Blueberries (any berries, really) will break down very quickly when heated and mixed with sugar. I’ve never been a real fan of blueberry muffins, but BB pancakes: oh, yeah. Ditto pies. We just canned several quarts of blueberry jam. The berries were cooked with wildflower honey, lemon, zest, and star anise. The trick is in knowing when to stop cooking, so the jam doesn’t become too thick. You’ll notice that there is NO pectin in that mixture. Berries have a natural pectin.
There are different varieties of blueberries, also. Some make better pies than others. The wild variety is my favorite. They’re smaller and more tart than the domesticated type, and just taste better when you pick them yourself.
I just recently did a thread about the whole fennel/licorice/anise thing…which just blows my mind. I can’t understand how that flavor group is considered to be pleasant at all. I get it with other things I don’t personally like, I can detect why others might, but this is a headshaker for me.
I remember a George Carlin routine about how “There is no blue food! Blueberries?! Blue on the vine, purple on the plate! We want the blue food! Blue food probably bestows immortality!”
N.B.: George Carlin is dead (I guess he never found the blue food), so you can’t tell him blueberries grow on trees, not vines.
I went blueberry-picking once and the plants impressed me as small trees, not bushes . . . but let’s not go there.
"I once overheard two botanists arguing over a Damned Thing that had blasphemously sprouted in a college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing was a tree and the other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good scholary arguments, and they were still debating when I left them. The world is forever spawning Damned Things- things that are neither tree nor shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white- and the categorical thinker can only regard the spiky and buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which violate “common sense”, that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy inertia. The whole history of science is the odyssey of a pixilated card- indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately juggling his classifications to fit them in, just as the history of politics is the futile epic of a long series of attempts to line up the Damned Things and cajole them to march in regiment.‘’
Were these commercial blueberries? If so, then you haven’t experience the true joy of wild blueberries. They taste ten times better than commercial berries, which were bred for ease of handling rather than flavor.
I was blessed enough to live the first 6 years of my charmed childhood in a house with rows of berry bushes growing by the road. Blueberries, raspberries, and something else I can’t remember, just growing wild. I’m sure someone planted them with good intentions, but it was long before we moved in.
Blueberries + fresh milk and a little touch of sugar = absolute heaven.
However, it spoiled me, and I don’t ever think ‘omg I want some blueberry food!’
I would never turn down fresh blueberries in a bowl, though
We had wild blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, wintergreen, asparagus, and grapes. (We also had wild choke cherries and crab apples but you can’t really eat those off the plant.)
I’m the opposite…fresh blueberries taste like plants to me, and cooked blueberries are heaven! No idea why I’m missing something here; most other fruits taste equally good to me cooked / fresh (though of course the flavor changes a bit).
Blueberry pies are nasty, I agree. More for the rest of you. But then, I am not fond of any kind of fruit pie - I think pies generally ruin fruit in general.
There are blueberry pies and then there are “blueberry” pies. Putting aside the fact that different varietie of blueberries will make different tasting pies, just like a Delicious apple will make a terrible pie, but a Baldwin apple will make a scrumptious pie, the reason you don’t like blueberry pies may be because you haven’t had one. When my mother used to make blueberry pies, she used whole berries and when you cut into the piece of pie with your fork, blueberries rolled across the plate. Nowadays, if you order blueberry pie in a restaurant or buy one in a supermarket, it will be filled not with blueberries but with a purple-colored gunk that looks and tastes like glue. If you can’t see the individual blueberries, it is not blueberry pie.
This just made me hop over to Wikipedia and I just learned something today: The berries you Americans call blueberries are not the same species as the berries us Scandinavians call blueberries.
There’s a variety of blueberry breeds. Some are low bushs where the berries are only an inch or two off the ground. Others are upright plants where the berries grow several feet up.
My mom is infamous for buying, every holiday, those horrible gluey cheap fruit pies for dessert, the kind you buy to fill up the stomaches of a bunch of non-picky children. Since there are no children in our family, picky or non-picky, no one wants the gluey pie at all. She tries to foist them off on ME, and it’s easier just to take the things and foist them off on someone else. Or just throw them out. But the Shur-Fine blueberry pie, on sale for $1.99 with a $20 purchase, is especially foul.
So I came across this recipe. It is to a store pie as a rose is to a dandelion.
3 C. fresh blueberries
2-3 TB. cornstarch
2/3 C. water
1/2 - 3/4 C. sugar
2 TB. fresh lemon juice and grated rind from half a lemon
2 TB. butter
pinch of salt
a scant tsp. of cinnamon
1 baked pie shell
whipped cream
Mix the cornstarch into the water so there are no lumps, and mix in the sugar and 1 C. of berries. Bring to a boil, stirring, until it thickens.
Add lemon juice and rind, cinnamon, salt, and butter, stir till butter melts. Cool, covered with saran wrap so it doesn’t develop a skin, in the refrigerator. Stir in the rest of the berries, spoon into the pie shell, and chill some more. Serve with whipped cream.
I grew up in a place where blueberries grew in profusion. If we would go out and pick, Mom would bake pies; it was an automatic given.
Us kids would usually go out and pick a couple of ice cream pails of them – plenty for pies and for having in a bowl of cream with sugar, if we wished, or for on your cereal the next morning.
Anyway, when she made pies, all I remember her doing was washing them in a strainer and then putting them into her pie crusts and sprinkling sugar over the tops of them before adding the top crust. This would cook to almost like a “preserves stage”, but the individual berries would be discernable although somewhat dehydrated from what they originally were. Where the raw berries were tart, the ones in the pie had been sweetened by the sugar.
And yeah, they grew on a plant that was somewhat like a strawberry plant, in that it had runners and covered the ground. These plants could get big, but never got any taller than maybe three inches at the maximum – a “big” blueberry plant is one that covers a lot of surface area – but they never got tall enough to be referred to as a shrub.
As for blue-coloured berries that grow on a tree, there are Saskatoon Berries, and they’re very tart.
That purple-colored gunk is canned blueberry pie mix with cornstarch added as a thickener, and probably HFCS as a sweetener. Then the crust is made with crisco, it’s over handled to make sure there is no flakiness, and brushed with eggwhite to make it shiny. Ghastly things.
We have a fruit bowl every morning that includes blueberries. The whole thing is topped with plain yogurt, cinnamon and honey.
