Organic strawberry boiled sweets from Saint-Ange, the French confectioner — sugar boiled, flavoured, cooled and cut, with no synthetic colouring and no artificial flavourings.
The strawberry you know is an accident, and a fairly recent one. Wild European strawberries are tiny and were what everyone ate until the eighteenth century. The large modern fruit — Fragaria × ananassa — came about in Brittany, when a Chilean species with big pale fruit, brought back from South America by a French spy named Amédée-François Frézier, was planted near a North American species from Virginia and the two hybridised. Every garden strawberry in the world descends from that unplanned cross. The species name ananassa means “pineapple-like”, after the new fruit's aroma.
And it is not a berry. Botanically the strawberry is not a fruit at all in the ordinary sense: the red flesh is swollen receptacle tissue, and the real fruits are the little pips on the outside — each one an achene containing a single seed. It is one of the very few plants that wears its fruit on the outside.
Why strawberry is so hard to get right in confectionery. Fresh strawberry aroma depends on furaneol and a large supporting cast of esters, and most of them are destroyed by heat — which is precisely what boiling sugar to 150 °C does. It is the reason so much strawberry confectionery tastes like an idea of strawberry rather than the fruit. Working without artificial flavourings makes the problem harder, not easier, and is the reason a sweet like this tastes rounder and less shrill than a supermarket one.
Honestly: these are sweets. Organic sugar is still sugar. What organic certification buys here is the absence of synthetic dyes and artificial flavourings — worth having in something this brightly coloured, and no more than that.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.
Sophie m
Hey Yum
Bonbon-France
