It's the berries, mate

For years I’ve found the fruit you get in the local supermarkets tasteless. With the exception of apples, oranges, grapes and sometimes cherries, everything (especially stone fruit) has the consistency of concrete chunks, the juice of a tax form and the taste of cardboard.

This usually includes berries. Occasionally you can find blueberries that don’t feel and taste like little balls of paste. And since all strawberries now seem to come from Driscoll, they’re gigantic, hard replicas of berries with no fragrance or taste.

So this summer I signed up for a CSA from a farm in Pennsylvania. So far, I’ve had two deliveries, both of which included strawberries. (The first one also had peaches, which frankly were indistinguishable from what I could find at Wegman’s—if they don’t smell like peaches, they won’t taste like peaches. The second had a clamshell of cherry plums, which were mildly flavorful, but of course they journeyed from South Carolina to Pennsylvania and then to the People’s Republic. The CSA farm did notify customers that it’s been a rocky year for fruit and they’d be supplementing their supplies with items from elsewhere.)

Those strawberries, though—they were the absolute berries (if I may be so bold.) Small, intensely flavored, richly crimson. They absolutely exploded with flavor. The first time in years I haven’t had to sprinkle sugar on a bowl to entice any taste out of them.

See what I mean?

Just a tiny slurp of Cointreau to macerate these babies:

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