Yet another try at the supermarket, yet another batch of cardboard-tasting strawberries. I tried organic - same thing. Tried “natural food” stores - same thing.
I am willing to pay quadruple the price for honest-to-god good-tasting strawberries. Where can I get some?
I think the correct question is “when can I get good strawberries?”. The answer is May to July. Strawberries aren’t in season, so they are all terrible right now.
This isn’t the time to find good ones, but to pick out a good one, sniff the box. It should have a distinct strawberry aroma. If the aroma is weak, the strawberries will be less sweet.
I’ll expand on WarmNPrickly’s post to say that good strawberries are in season and local. They don’t ship well when ripe, and they don’t ripen with any flavor during shipping.
Commercial strawberries are bred to be disease-resistant, have large yields, be firm enough to travel well, and look good on the shelf. Flavor is a lower priority.
Search out a farmer’s market selling local berries when they’re in season. Virtually every site I checked listed Earliglow strawberries as one of the best flavored varieties. Other varieties noted for good-flavor are Allstar, Alpine, Annapolis, Avalon, Clancy, Darselect, Kent, Mesabi, Raritan, Sable, Saint-Pierre, and Sparkle.
I will say though, around valentines day around here, the stores do suddenly seem to get some strawberries that are pretty good. Many shops and grocery stores will sell them next to chocolate fountains and such. I haven’t quite figured where those come from. I suspect they are hot house strawberries.
Exactly.
If you want good berries in the off-season, buy a lot of them from a local grower (or grow your own) during the season and freeze them. Frozen berries keep really well and hold their flavor for a long time.
Winter strawberries are the pits, for sure. We are eagerly awaiting the Hood River berries to be in season here in OR. Melty, sugary strawberry goodness.
While not quite as good as the locally grown, farmers market strawberries we’ll be getting in Chicago in 3 months, we just got some organic strawberries from Costco that were soft, sweet, and very good.
Direct from the source, not from a store, in season only, around here (Cali Central Coast) that’s roughly baseball season, March through October.
Didn’t say where you were.
Maryland
Late May - June
Sorry, for the hijack, but I’ve a related questionn that, I think doesn’t deserve a specific thread.
I assume that strawberries have been introduced in the Americas by Europeans. So, my question is : do you have wild straberries too (very small, and very flavoured) there?
Not exactly - the “European” garden strawberry is actually a hybrid of two New World varieties, but produced in France. So yes, they do have wild strawberries (apparently everywhere outside Africa & Australia does)
The best strawberries I ever tasted were bought from a rural shack next to a strawberry field in California in July.
They’d been picked about an hour earlier. 
Interesting. I had no clue that wild strawberries used to be cultivated, let alone that what we call now strawberry is of American origin.
But then (and regarding the OP) where are those “Virginian strawberries” which I guess were probably delicious? Are they still found in the wild? Are they cultivated? Are they as large as common garden strawberries or as small as wild european ones?
I’ve eaten wild strawberries (they grow in upstate NY where I grew up). They’re much smaller than commercial strawberries - about the size of a peanut - but the taste is amazing.
One thing about wild strawberry bushes is they don’t produce berries every year. So one year you’ll find a bunch of berries in a patch but they’ll be none there when you come back the next couple of years. I can imagine something like that would frustrate commercial growers.
I used to pick them when I was a kid - there was an undeveloped area not far from our house. Yum.
We used to have wild strawberries growing in our yard. Each berry was maybe the size of an adult’s pinkie fingernail and had an intense flavor and sweetness. If you were lucky you could find maybe three ripe ones at a time, as the birds loved them, too.