Chokecherries Review and Juice Recipe - Weird Fruit Explorer Ep. 111
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- Опубліковано 25 сер 2024
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Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)
Origin: North America
Its foraging month! For the next five weeks I will be exploring wild fruits that grow in parks throughout NYC. Choke Cherries are an interesting one to start with. Like many of the others I will review in upcoming weeks, it requires preparation to enjoy, so I will be making juice out of them.
I found these as on a foraging tour with Wildman Steve Brill, who has tours throughout NYC's parks, for more information go to: www.wildmanstevebrill.com
How dare they complain of dirty nails!! Foraging the fruits is hard labor and dirty nails comes with the territory! I for one appreciate your nails Jared.
Thank you Krystal haha
Funny, when I found your channel my first thought was that your nails looked weirdly clean, like you'd just had a manicure. Honestly after watching you use a knife I'm just glad you have fingers, lol
@@joshuaamoore This.
Trim your nails and then dirty nail complaints aren't an issue.
It's really sad to see a very interesting and informative channel not that popular. I love your information on different fruits, thank you. :)
It's a pretty niche thing to make videos about. I'm surprised I have as many subscribers as I do.
You deserve more subs! Keep on making videos! :)
+David Graham thanks
@@WeirdExplorer I'm glad that after 4 years since this comment you've finally gotten the attention you deserve!
@@jessesaranow7724 I hope his channel would get even more attention :) the content he makes is amazing- It’s awesome seeing all these fruits I didn’t even know exist
Ahh Chokecherry trees. My parents have a wild one growing in the backyard. Growing up, there used to be whole rows of chokecherry trees along the side of a trail besides the neighbouring fields but the farmer decided to cut everything within six feet of the trail down because they were starting to branch out to closely due to growth. We would go out with those large white 4 Litre mayonnaise tubs from Costco and come back with at least two completely filled up with chokecherries. My parents would make wines with them and add raisins during fermentation for flavor and sweetness. The wines age well and reach their peak at around three years of age if I recall correctly but I could be wrong, it was more of their project and I only helped them bottle it. (The wine was for personal consumption within the family not for sales.)
Sounds good, they have an interesting flavor, I could see the wine being very tasty.
Chokecherries are great for jam. Chokecherry jam is a personal favorite of mine.
Native American from Idaho here!
We (our tribe) STILL make chokecherry jam, pudding, and it can be frozen for a nice snack.
Chokecherry pudding is by far one of the best ways to make it :)
PS just found your channel and I love it!
How do you make the pudding
@@samanthacasas3091
Recipe from "Berry Pudding (Northern Cheyennes make Chokecherry Pudding)"
Boil berries in a large saucepan, the water should be a couple of inches above the berries. Boil approximately 10 minutes.
Strain berry juice and save.
Mash the berries to release the juice. Set aside the berries.
Mix "enough flour and water" to make a thick mixture but not a paste.
Note: several recipes suggest: 5 cups flour; 5 cups water; 3 cups sugar; 10 cups chokecherries
Using the same boiling pan, pour mashed berries and less than half of the saved berry juice back in the pan. Heat at medium-high, slowly pouring the flour mixture in the pan. Keep stirring. If liquid gets thick, pour more berry juice, but not too much.
Keep stirring the pudding until it comes to a boil; immediately remove from the stove, there should be some juice left. After the pudding cools, add sugar to taste. Do not leave the pudding cooking, it needs to be kept stirred.
I live in Saskatchewan and have made Chokecherry jam (yum!).
I had never heard of the pudding, and hope it is tasty. Berry picking season is upon us! :)
My grandmother used to make a syrup from chokecherries for use on pancakes through the winter when fresh fruit wasn't available. She did the same with saskatoons as well. As a kid, I would cheerfully gobble down either fruit by the handful, never thinking about how useful they might be if preserved. How our attitudes have changed with the "global village" making fruit easily available year round.
I have lots of these in my yard some are really bitter and a few are sweet enough to eat without the dry mouth. I put them in the oven at 150 until the skin starts to pucker, it makes them really sweet to snack on
PS: you really need to try them when they are more ripe. When unripe like those you had they are so gross! But when they ripen fully, they are quite soft and very dark red almost black and the taste changes a lot. Your juice/jelly/wine etc will also be much much better if they are ripe.
We have these things growing all over our yard, we've got like five separate bushes. I've never eaten them red, I always wait till they turn black, and then they really aren't bitter at all. They're mildly sweet, but if you wait till they've been ripe for a couple of weeks they get a little sweeter
never eat them red they are very stringent they turn sweeter after the first Frostand if you crack the pits and cook them the cyanide is neutralized but makes a better flavor for jams and jellies and other recipes
Man oh man, chokecherry jam is one of my favorite things. I pretty much can't stand cherries but the chokecherry has that sour that I love. The area I grew up made huckleberry and chokecherry jam. So so good.
A flashback to 5th grade where English teacher made us read The Hatchet, bloody gut cherries.
*New memory unlocked*
When I was a kid we had chokecherry trees near the house. My stepmother and stepsister collected the chokecherries (wouldn't let the boys help) and then when winter came around they put it and a couple bags of sugar in a big crock behind the oil heater and covered it with a cheesecloth. It turned into chokecherry wine which smelled quite good.
ooh that sounds pretty good and I don't even drink
This reminds me of my poor 20's in Seattle. Found a guide of every fruit/nut on public lands in the city limits. Ate very well for a few years. Never saw anyone else picking.
"i also cleaned my nails" amazing
+Jen Perry And someone still disliked the video.. geez, there just is no pleasing some people.
+Jared Rydelek what do they want from you?!
+Jen Perry blood probably
That comment in the video had me rolling.😆
??????????
I remember picking these by the gallon as a kid. We called them “ Capulin” and made them into jam, and wine. Super tart but really delicious.
Brill's app was very helpful for me navigating my local wild resources in college. Staten Island is a veritable larder of plant foods.
I grew up with these I LOVE them!!!!! Lol we used to have contests on who could eat the most. Good memories
"It is supposed to kill off some of that cyanide in there"
.....
😐
My grandmother used to make chokecherry jelly. She would wait until the berries were black. It is some of the best jelly I've ever had.
sounds good!
Chock cherry jelly is my absolute favorite. Its hard to find in California.
MONIQUE
We used to go camping with an elderly couple and on a trip we went on with them to Oregon she made choke cherry jelly. It was the best jelly I've ever had. It was beautiful too like a jewel. Loved it!
Damn, like a few seconds before you described the taste in the beginning, I thought of those exact same adjectives.
I couldn’t love this channel or concept more... the coffee substitute videos are also awesome. That’s wild that your chokecherries weren’t sour.
Thank you!
We have a black chokecherry tree in our backyard. When picked fully ripe they do taste like black cherries. The astringent factor is caused by both the seeds and the skin. I just squirt the juice into my mouth instead of sucking on them since you negate the astringent factor that way. If you juice them, they make an excellent black cherry flavored jelly.
As a child we picked these berries and my mother made syrup. I still love chokecherry syrup to this day.
Absolutely loved eating chokecherries off the tree, initially enjoying the taste, letting the astringency hit, spitting it out, forgetting the taste and wanting more
I like your curiousityshelf 👻👌🏻
Thanks! I've been collecting oddities for years now. These days I mostly just pick up things when I travel.
Steve seems like a really cool dude. You can tell he enjoys what he does.
I wish a guy like Steve could start tours in my hometown :)
I made cranberry juice at home and I also got a sort of creaminess to it. not quite milk creaminess, but definitely not like the cranberry juice one would buy
This is just a guess, but lesser ripe may be sold fresh because people usually make cranberry sauce with them and they might have more pectin in that state.
+Jared Rydelek You're probably right on that. That didn't even cross my mind
info warrior, good idea. I'll see if I can output higher, I film in HD but its lost in the editing.
ever tried a sour chery? rly sower and bitter but in a juce they are rly good
they are slightly differant then choke cherries as the are native to the middle east and around there, they also dont come in bunches like those
What is the name of the song?
@ethan the jigglypuff, I have a Kiwano Melon review filmed, but it won't be up for a couple months.
We eat them off the tree while we are cutting and rolling the first hay crop.
Them and mulberry are ripe during that time. Nice little snack.
And if you have time the mulberry make a grate wine.
Jared,They are Prunus Virginia, and there are many, many species. Here, in Alaska, we call them Mayflower tree, some times they are really look like Chockeberries, /Aronia/. Mainly, because some of them yield rather large size fruits. I wonder the one you harvested from what color of trunk did it have? There is a different between the yellow and grey trunk one. My favorite specie is the Canada red, it was cultivated obviously in Canada. Working for the City of Wasilla during the summer season, I eat so much from the moment it started to get dark color. They are very pretty trees, and I have some of those fruits in brandy for years. They are also hardy plants and with good pruning gorgeous, edible and healthy landscape pieces and great timber. Be aware of their fast growing, and fertile nature, if a sapling is not taken care in time, the parent plant can choke. Just like many other Prunus species the better the care, the better the fruit's taste. We have some in our Iditorad Park on the ponds bank, and other about 4 blocks away on the road side as filtering shade. The ones at the water side barely have any bitter taste, the others on the arid, or less irrigated spots are horrible. They are also having the hint of their "neighbor" plants taste, for example the ones with dandelion, skunk lily, ramsons or other wild garlic ground cover tend to be less enjoyable than the ones have currants, lingon berries etc. By the way, did you ever try a Tart or Sour Cherry, /Prunus cerasus/?; which is different cherry; if we talk about sour taste, gives as it gets, but no fear of poison. Sorry, I guess I run over my own mouth once again but seems I cannot help it. I applaud your New York buddy, being in the same business, City Foragers or City Truckers.
+Angela Goodwin Thanks for sharing. Thats very interesting how trees can pick up flavors from neighboring plants.
Awesome clean stove, and your hands are lovely! My grandma used to have us go pick these on the Pueblo. We made chokecherry jelly. Yum!
great one from the vault 👌🏻
thanks!
Just sampled a bit from my yard. It's like if cherries were tiny with huge seeds and zero sugar with a hint of feeling poisoned as it touches the tongue. Highly recommended if you're a masochist.
Love the wild taste of choke berries.
I love trying new fruit! So glad to have found this channel :]
Interesting video (as always) This is one I've always kind of overlooked, as I had always been told they were ornamental trees at best, now I may have to revisit them. I wonder if the creamy taste/texture is perhaps due to the presence of the high amount of pectin they are naturally abundant in, because judging from the appearance of the concentrate stage (after adding sugar and boiling) it probably would have gelled on its own had it been allowed to cool completely.
+izonker I think you're right. If I were to use riper berries I think it wouldn't be as creamy. Might try doing it again later in the season when they are around.
I really like your videos on the more local flora, especially the "that's poisonous" said parents but turns out it's not. And other more "survival" type foods.
for a really long time i knew choke cherries as gut berries from gary paulsen's novel "Hatchet"
...Only clicked this cause I had a flashback to middle school reading The Hatchet. Its the gut cherries!
When ripe I regularly strip them off the bush and fill my mouth with them. Eat them one at a time and spit out the pit. Very tasty when ripe with the only flaw that they are astringent. Have made jam from them as well.
We picked them red for jam and deeper for juice. All you have to do is add sugar and let it simmer and you'll have Jam.
LMAO love how clean your stove looks now! Never heard of chokecherry, very intersting
Glad someone appreciates it. ;)
When I was a child, my mother made Chokecherry jam every year. We processed probably a hundred pounds of chokecherries every fall. They do taste a lot better when they are ripe.
sounds good!
You should have skimmed it and then it would have gone from Pink like Pepto Bismol to cherry red.
I was thinking the same thing .
Nice video! there are choke cherries every where where I am during the summer. After trying them I just thought it's a shame this astringency is ruining this great little fruit. So I am pleased to hear that turning them into a juice gets rid of most of that and ends up a pleasant drink.
+chigimonky Lucky! Try making juice/jam you have a goldmine there
What does astringent mean?
google it
@@melody3741 - sort of bitter.
@@melody3741 it's the flavor that feels like it soaks up all the moisture in your mouth.
I would recommend trying Prunus serotina also called Black cherry which is the sweeter better cousin of the chokecherry and it is more common than the chokecherry.
You should try the chokeberry as well, it is very astringent but makes awesome juice especially when mixed with apple juice!
We have choke cherries in our garden - those are sweet, a bit astringent, a bit sour and not bitter at all. Very very good to make fruit drinks - tastes like a mix of cherry and red currant, you're right)) We don't mash them. We just boil them in waster and you get transparent red frui drink.
Or You just put washed cherries into a glass jar - about 1/4-1/3 of volume - and then fill the rest with boiling water and a bit of sugar. After 15 minutes you need to put this water into a pot (without cherries) and reboil it, and fill the jar with cherries again. After that you can put a lid on a jar and save it for winter. Or wait until jar gets to room temperature and drink it))))
I have V. 'Jefferson' in the ground, that red color of your chokecherries reminds me of it.
How about a series on the forageable plants on the highline? That's a nice day's walk.
+mark miner I noticed the edible fruits on the highline. Its way too crowded and regulated though; I would probably get escorted off within 2 minutes.
I loved chokecherries. Growing up in Wisconsin, I would eat them off the trees when very ripe.
I love choke cherry jelly. My Grandma, used these for making pectin.
Always a useful and interesting channel
methods of removing astringency in fruits include soaking, cooking and dehydrating. very astringent, inedible persimmon varieties become sweet and edible when dried.
Probably a bit late for this now, but to maximise your juice extraction, try to find a big old porcelaine Buchner funnel and vaccum flask, and get a cheap hand vaccuum pump that you can get amazingly cheap in care brake fluid changing kits. Put a coarse filter paper or fine mesh in the funnel and cover with the fruit pulp. Then put cling film over the top and hold it to the sides with a rubber band while you pump air out of the flask and suck the funnel down and the juice out. The cling film is a modern refinement as it stops the air rushing in as the pulp is sucked dry and it acts like a piston to force the juice out from aboveand below at the same time. You'll be amazed how much juice is still in the pulp after you have just filtered it by gravity!
Ripe ones make great jelly. You can make brandy with them too.
have fond memories of chokecherries, gram made jelly from them where they grew at the summer house in upstate new york
chokecherries are the best our house had a chokecherry tree the chokecherries in a south dakota are sweet and sour not bitter. I have never seen the berries so large, the berries in south dakota are smaller. You need to try them from the dakotas.
i love choke cherrys every summer the choke cherrys get ripe and i pick em of my yard
Here in montana we dont eat chokecherries until they are fully ripe which is when they turn almost black they are pretty good right off the three I used to go outside and eat them for hours. They also make very good to make syurp jam and sometimes even an ingredient in smoothies.
I love this channel.
One year a huge chokecherry tree fell. It was loaded with chokecherries, we picked a big bucket. I found a recipe for chokecherry jelly. It was the best jelly I ever had. Too hard to pick a bucket from standing trees. Yes, be sure the chokecherries are black.
Spread on a pan and cooked at 150 until the skin starts to pucker and they sweeten up and the astringent goes away. I have a few in my yard that are sweet right off the tree, like any wild fruit they vary from tree to tree. Also the poison in the seed is the same that is in other cherrys, peaches, apples, almonds, and many others so don't worry much about it and as long as you don't chew any of the seeds from any of those it will just pass right through you.
cool song at the end
This is really neat. I would never have thought that NYC had wild edibles growing all over the place, as long as you know where to look, very cool. Also Choke Cherries are such beautiful little berries. If you didn't know any better you would think they were a nice bunch of sweet, succulent Cherries or Red Grapes. That's a very deceptive little berry. Might be fun to put a bowl of them out for your freinds and play a little trick on them. 😉 Also, I'm now watching you prepare this juice and I'm thinking to myself, "oh, you made Pepto Bismal. Mmmm, looks so yummy...." 😐 I'm actually really surprised that it ended up tasting a lot better than it looked.
I absolutely love the music in the intros to your videos. What songs are they?
chokecherry jam is the best thing ever
I love these!
We had a chokecherry growing in our yard in Winnipeg when I was growing up. The birds LOVED the ripe cherries...in August and early September when the fruit were at their ripest, you'd see bird crap for miles with the seeds in it (seed dispersal agents!). But for us humans, the tree (it got to about 20 feet tall) was a bit of a pain...you see, it didn't really want to be a tree at all, but a shrub, so every year it would send up hundreds of suckers into the lawn (in a radius of about 4-5 feet), each one requiring some significant effort to dispatch (I personally didn't care if the tree became shrubby, but my parents...they wanted a tree, NOT a shrub). I'd eat the berries off the tree occasionally...I'd get used to the astringency and actually enjoy them after awhile. And I think we made jelly once. But the fruit were most useful for pranking people thinking that I was giving them nice, sweet blueberries. The name CHOKEcherry is appropriate here - there was certainly a LOT of choking.
Oh, I never saw cherries that red before, even unripe...they were dark burgundy when they first grew, before darkening further to near-black. Must be a different variety of chokecherry. Also, our cherries never got that big...the biggest I saw were MAYBE in the 1 cm diameter range, most of which was seed.
My procrastination has no limits, from smartphones to rollercoasters, now to cherry video. 😂 (p.s. I do really love cherries tho)
The chokecherries in Maryland are much smaller. They would ferment on the ground, and birds would get drunk. Yes, the pits are going to be toxic: They are part of the same family as almonds.
Chokecherries are awesome… we have them growing wild here in Nova Scotia, Canada… I make jelly with them every summer. You have to make jelly and not jam because there is some sort of toxin in the seed that you can’t eat. I’d gladly send you a jar to try for your show if you want. Just let me know what the shipping address is. Leave me an email address to contact you about it if your interested.
#weirdexplorer I like your channel because I get to see so many different kinds of fruits that I usually don't get see where I live.
Lol, i described it as kinda sweet dry mouth. Lol
I made syrup with the ones i found that the birds hadnt devoured. Will probably try it on ice cream tonight
I love chokecherries (yes, I eat them raw), and jam and syrup from them if it's not over sweetened. The flavour is part of home for me. (Northcentral Alberta Canada). The native ones here are red when ripe.
I recommend finding and tasting pin cherries, if you haven't yet.
how is this such an underrated episode
My childhood was filled with chokecherry jam. we ate the ripe (black) chokecherries when we picked them. but not when they were red. we had a sieve that we mashed the seed and fruit to get pulp. but we NEVER used unripe berries
Can we get you some decent cookware, bowls, spoons, a proper spatula?
Autumn olives also come out creamy when you cook them. That was surprising the first time
We had a tree in our yard, child me had a rough moment thinking they were like store-bought cherries ':D
These look like the berries from the fourth Pokemon movie. Very pretty
Some fruits are never meant to be enjoyed eaten as they are; they are meant to be cooked first into any creativity you like.
Just saying, that’s very wise. God bless you.
Liked just for the intro.
Eating a red one is like eating a green persimmon. Eat a ripe black one and they are amazing. I grew up eating them. Find a ripe one and try again
we have some of these in our neighborhood.
Cool
My grandmother makes jelly from them, one of the best jellies you could ever have!
If they are that tart and astringent, they must be under ripe
I saw the fruit cluster and thought that they were bitter cherries (Prunus emarginata), not chokecherries (Prunus virginiana). But I looked it up, and the chokecherries out west where I live are different. Their fruit cluster is more elongated and the cherries are a very dark color The fruit starts out green and changes to the dark color without turning red. The eastern variety is Prunus virginiana var. virginiana, and the western variety I am familiar with is Prunus virginiana var. demissa. The chokeberries to which you refer belong to the genus Aronia. Some people use the names chokecherry and chokeberry interchangeably, which is why there are scientific names for living things. If you are showing people wild foods to eat you might consider using the scientific names.
I love eating chokecherries right off the tree. Usually they are quite astringent, but some trees are better than others. I found some trees near Steamboar Springs, Colorado that were very tasty. And one grows in my yard here in Boise, and they are pretty good too. Last year I harvested them and made juice, and it was delicious! But the bitter cherries (Prunus emarginata) are pretty nasty!
I have studied edible plants for most of my life and have all of Ewell Gibbons' books!
thanks for the info!
They make jam out of it in Santa Fe NM
They are good when you need fresh food and are out camping.
When we were young kids we used to dare each other to eat chokecherries! Ick. But we went and picked all day so that my dad could make juice. Our mothers always said don't eat those!!
i have choke betrys near my sisters school they tatse quite good when they are near going of season not sure as it was a few years ago
If you wait until after the first frost they are much sweeter
Would you go through the trouble of making it again?
+Challenge Bros definitely. I'd try with riper berries though and see if it gives a stronger flavor.
*sigh* I miss the chokecherry jelly that a gal in Siskiyou County CA made when I was growing up. It was absolutely phenomenal.... :( That, and starthistle honey...
Also get stainless steel pans, as lots of fruit dissolves aluminium. :/
Remember these from the book hatchet.
your reaction to the taste of the berry was the same as mine.lol
I wonder how comparable the astringency of the fresh fruit is to that of an unripe persimmon...or as I call them: the alum fruit. Ripe persimmons are really sweet and mild with a gel-like quality...but unripe persimmons are like eating a sour blow-drier.