Whole dried wild blueberries, hand-picked in the forest understorey at the foot of the Dinaric Alps — the limestone range running down the eastern Adriatic through Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro — and dried with nothing but a little apple juice.
Wild is not a marketing word here
Wild European blueberries are Vaccinium myrtillus, the bilberry, and they are a genuinely different fruit from the cultivated blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) you buy in a punnet.
The easiest way to tell them apart: cut one open. A cultivated blueberry is pale green-white inside with the colour only in the skin. A wild bilberry is deep purple all the way through — the anthocyanin pigments are in the flesh as well as the skin. That is why bilberries stain your fingers, your tongue and everything else, and why they taste so much more intensely of blueberry than the large cultivated ones.
They are also small, they grow low to the ground on ancient forest floors, and they cannot be machine-harvested — which is precisely why the label says hand-picked and why they cost what they cost.
What we do not claim — and the apple juice, honestly
There is no authorised EU health claim for blueberries or bilberries of any kind — not for the anthocyanins, not for eyesight, not for anything — and "superfruit" has no legal or nutritional definition, so neither word appears on this page. The eyesight story is worth knowing about: it comes from a Second World War account of RAF pilots eating bilberry jam to improve night vision, which was almost certainly wartime misdirection and has never been supported by trials.
And about the apple juice: it is a better ingredient than added sucrose, and it brings its own acidity and flavour rather than flat sweetness. But nutritionally, fruit juice concentrate is sugar. It counts towards the sugars figure under EU labelling and it behaves the same way in your body. "Sweetened with apple juice" is nicer; it is not sugar-free.
What to do with them
- From the bag, as they are — they are intense, and a small handful goes further than you expect.
- In porridge, muesli, granola or yoghurt.
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Soaked in warm water or apple juice for twenty minutes, which plumps them back up and makes them behave like fresh fruit in baking.
- In muffins, pancakes and scones — dried bilberries hold their shape where fresh ones collapse and bleed.
- With game, duck or a strong cheese, which is how the Balkans and the Alps have always used them.
Practical
Naturally dried fruit clumps and is sticky — that is correct, and a sign nothing has been added to stop it. Store airtight in a cool, dark place. They stain. Genuinely, permanently, on cloth and on worktops.
Voted Best Organic Product 2018 by a consumer jury.
treatfuls
treatfuls
treatfuls
