Oh my gosh...........I am in black raspberry picking mode now and the very first thing I did with them was make a huge pie. It's how they're used best. LOL. I'm juicing some tonight for jelly tomorrow.

LOL, oh there will definitely be a pie coming by the start of next week!! However, if the weather holds I think I'll get more then enough to put up someone how too. Just trying to see what my options are. I usually don't get this much, especially from wild ones!

Syrup for winter pancakes, freeze some for later cobblers and turnovers or make the cobblers and turnovers now and freeze them for baking later. Then there are marinated compotes, liquers, vinegars, or make wine. The Chocolate-Raspberry Sauce in the big Ball Book (they call it Sundae topper) Pg. 188 is sinfully good.

Or you can just send a box of them to me. :)

Dave

Dave, for all the assistance you are to this forum and all of us novices I would gladly send you a box!! I've heard so many great things about the Chocolate-Raspberry Sauce that I think that is high up on the list!! My wife is skeptical about the combo but the thought of some good homemade ice cream is more then enough to get me trying it. I think as soon as I get another box of pectin (used it all up on strawberry jam) I will be making some of that.

Anybody know what makes the Sauce different then the jam consistency wise? It just seem very close recipe wise and one is a nice firm jam and the other is a sauce.

Mine was a bit softer than jam. It was good stirred into vanilla yogurt.

You can make pie fillings using the one for blackberry or there is a raspberry one, too. You need Clear Jel for pie fillings.
I use this all the time with great results.
Syrups made from blackberries, huckleberries, raspberries, boysenberries, loganberries, sour cherries, and Island Belle grapes as well as mixtures of berries are of good flavor, color, and consistency (thin like maple syrup, medium thick like corn syrup, or slightly jelled). Syrups can be made with or without pectin and lemon juice. Lemon juice may improve color. Use of pectin will vary consistency.

To Prepare Fruit Puree:
Sort, stem, and wash ripe fruit or thaw frozen unsweetened fruit; crush fruit thoroughly; measure crushed fruit. Add 1 cup boiling water to each 4 cups crushed fruit and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer to soften--about 5 for soft fruits...about 10 minutes for firm fruits like cherries and grapes. Press through sieve.

SYRUPS MADE WITH PUREE
4 cups puree
4 cups sugar
1/2 package or less powdered pectin (if desired)
3 or 4 Tbsp lemon juice (if desired)

1. Mix puree, sugar, pectin and lemon juice.
2. Bring to boil and stir for 2 minutes (boil till jelly thermometer reaches 218F).
3. Remove from heat, skim off foam, and pour into 1/2 pint or 1 pint jars to within 1/2 inch of top.
4. Adjust lids and process in boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes.
5. Remove from canner and cool.
6. Check lids, label, and store in cool, dry place.

To Prepare Fruit Juice:
Sort, stem and wash ripe fruit or thaw frozen, unsweetened fruit; crush fruit thoroughly. Place crushed fruit in dampened jelly bag and drain. For clearest juice, do not press bag to extract juice. For firm fruits, heat is needed to start flow of juice. Add about 1/2 cup water to each 3 cups crushed fruit. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Place hot fruit in dampened jelly bag; drain.

SYRUPS MADE WITH JUICE
4 cups juice
4 cups sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice (if desired)
1/2 package or less powdered pectin (if desired)

1. Mix juice, sugar, lemon juice and pectin.
2. Bring to boil and boil 2 minutes.
3. Remove from heat, skim off foam, and pour into 1/2 pint or 1 pint canning jars to within 1/2 inch of top.
4. Adjust lids and process in boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes.
5. Remove from canner and let cool.
6. Check lids, labels, and store in cool, dry place.

Raspberry Pie Filling
Makes 5 pint jars
7 cups raspberries
1 � cups sugar
2/3 cup Clear Jel
2 cups cool water
Blue and red food coloring, optional
2 T. bottled lemon juice
In a large stainless pan, combine sugar and Clear Jel. Whisk in water. Add food coloring, if desired. Bring to a boil over medium high heat. Stir constantly. Add lemon juice and return to a boil. Boil one minute. Reduce heat to low.
Quickly stir in raspberries and return to a boil over medium high heat. Stir frequently and gently until mixture boils. Remove from heat.
Ladle hot pie filling into hot jars, leave 1 inch headspace. Wipe rims clean, apply lids and rings.
Process in a boiling water bath canner with jars covered with water by 1 to 2 inches over the top of jars. Process for 30 minutes once water comes to a full boil.
Remove lid, let sit for 5 more minutes. Remove jars from the canner. Cool, check for seals. Wash jars and rings. Store in a cool place.

A friend once asked me what the difference was between blackberries and black raspberries. I told her "uhm.............about five dollars a quart"

All free for me!! Just came back inside....first picking of the year got about 3.5 lbs worth. My kind of system. They grow like weeds, I don't have to do anything but put on some long pants, push through, and pick!!! Hell if I tried to grow them in nice rows back in the garden I probably couldn't grow a single one!! Can't wait to see how many I can get this year. Thanks for all the great recipe ideas. I think it might be pie filling and the chocolate sauce/jam on the menu!! I'll let you know how it turns out!

I have a cultivated patch of them, as well as having wild patches on our property. However, the deer just love nibbling the tops off the black raspberries, and seem to leave the blackberries and red raspberries alone. I know what you mean by having free ones. I don't bother to have a 'tame' patch of blackberries, becuase at least an acre of our property are wild stands of them. However, with a property tended patch of black raspberries you notice the berries themselves are absolutely huge, about the equivalent of five of my wild ones.

We have a feral bee colony who work my berry patches with abandon, so we have amazing germination on the berries and this year the warmth and rains have allowed the berry to fill to its potential. Sometimes it just all comes together, and good thing......the apples and peaches are on their 'off' year.

This is how I like to use my black raspberries. It's my adaptation of the old grape "juice" recipe. It's pretty much just canned berries with extra syrup.

I have always used the wild berries, so I don't know how if this would work as well with the new larger varities coming out.

For what it's worth, here's the "juice" recipe. I just replace the grapes with a packed cup of black raspberries.

---Grape "Juice"---
Wash grapes and put 1 cup of raw grapes into a quart jar. Ladle boiled sugar syrup made of 1/2 cup sugar to 4 cups of water over the grapes. Leaving a 1/2-inch headspace, process pints and quarts for 15 minutes.

Jeremy - just wondering - I found some black raspberries growing in one of our fields near blacberries (elongated and nowhere near ripe so I know they're blackberries, raspberries are starting to ripen now). They're across the road from most of the red raspberries, but there are some red raspberries on that side too.

I'm trying to cut back brush and "organize" the wild berries a bit, these are growing right on the edge of the field we just leveled and spread topsoil on, where I'm growing tomatoes this year.

I read online that raspberries always have purple/red canes that bend down to root in the ground, but the new canes look green to me. The black raspberry canes that are bearing look dark but new ones right next to them are so light green they're practically white? The blackberry canes are really thorny and have much larger flowers, so I can tell those apart, but I didn't know we even had black raspberries til this week, so I didn't notice the flowers.

Anything you can describe (maybe a picture?) to help me recognize the black raspberry canes so I don't cut them down by mistake would be helpful - thanks.

Rapsberries have frosty looking, white primocanes. Primocanes are first year growth and bear no fruit. They can be quite long and wispy on first year growth. In my cultivated beds, I prune them to about waist high and weave them into wires that I have on spaced stakes so they stay upright through winter and when the second year, fruit-bearing growth comes on (it starts out green too, but turns woody and darker and is called the floracane) that is when the growth start to turn from green with frosty white 'bloom' to red/purple and woody. Those bear the fruit. If it has that glabrous, frosty look, it'll be a raspberry's young growth.

Thanks again for all the recipes!! I made some syrup from puree, some fie filling, and some of the chocolate raspberry topping in terms of canning. I also made a pie to take to a 4th of July picnic and also made some homemade black raspberry ice cream which we'll break into tonight!!! I'm still picking here although this hot weather is hitting hard. I was mentioning to my wife today that I was disappointed I didn't get enough strawberries to make the strawberry lemonade concentrate. Been on my wish list but I think I missed it again this year. Is there any way to modify this recipe for black raspberry and lemon juice? Obviously I'd have to strain the seeds but the SQUEEZO makes quick work of that.

Can I do it or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Thanks,

~Jeremy

Hehe....black raspberry NUT here. I start picking in early July - here in IL. last year (2010) I picked 18 gallon bags. Froze the whole bunch. I made jam in Dec. and still had 7 bags left over. I think I made about 40 1/2 pints of jam. It's SOOOooo good. Use it in plain yogurt, on vanilla Ice cream (be sure to buy a GOOD ice cream so as not to insult the berries) This year (2011) I picked only about 9 bags. Just too HOT out! But I still made over 30 half pints. Good stuff. If you cut the amount of pectin in the jam recipe, you'll get a nice 'syrup' that's not to thick and not to thin. Regular batch with about half the pectin to make syrup. I also made popcycles. Took one pint and mixed w/water. Froze up well, tasted even better.

Call me a nut, but I approach the plants with great respect. I've made it ritual to go picking at least ONE time a year in shorts and short sleeve tee shirt. I figure I should give the plants respect enough to approach them on THEIR terms rather than mine. A way of saying thank you I guess. Surprising how delicately you treat the plants while meandering through a black-raspberry patch considering you're physically threatened by it. Try it sometime. HAHA

I love these beautiful vines and they're so productive and delicious. I'm glad they haven't been domesticated by Monsanto....yet! Let's hope they never are.

Followup: as I've been picking these things for almost 20 years, I've notices something about their growing habits. Plants that get morning sun and afternoon shade will produce better berries. They don't like the afternoon HOT. Also, when a cluster begins to ripen, the center berry will turn black first. If you don't pick it, the surrounding berries will fatten up well and produce a better yield. If you pick it (the center) as soon as it's ripe, the surrounding berries will ripen FASTER, but not fatten up as much.

You still get a good yield, but sometimes you have those beautiful clusters the size of grapes - 7 or 8 at a time?? All ripe??? That's because the whole cluster was allowed to ripen on the plants schedule instead of picking the center as soon as it ripened. Just a thought for those who aren't competing with others in a wild patch. I normally am.

Not familiar with black raspberries, but I have wild dewberries and cultivated blackberries. I substitute one for the other (prefer the dewberries because of small seed size) in jams, juices, breads, etc. If you have a real bounty, try making sweet breads (similar to banana bread, squash bread, zucchini bread). I made a bunch of loaves of dewberry bread last year. The recipe was an extremely simple one I selected from an online search. It freezes extremely well. After cooling the baked loaves, I wrapped in foil and stored in zip lock bags in the freezer. I'd definitely try that with your black raspberries. I've made that recipe with fresh berries as well as berries that were frozen.

It's that time of year again! I just picked my first quart this morning and it looks like it's going to be a great black raspberry year again as long as the weather doesn't get too bad on me. I didn't want to start a whole other thread to ask this and take up valuable space so hopefully someone has scrolled down here to see my new post!

I just finished up making a batch of the strawberry lemonade concentrate. I think it's going to go great mixed with some sparkling water! Does anybody see a negative to doing the same thing but using the black raspberries instead? I'd run them through the SQUEEZO to get the seeds out and then mix it with the lemon juice, sugar, etc. I can't see with all the lemon juice there being any safety issues but I figured I'd check with the experts. Thanks!!

I can juices every year...dewberry, blackberry, mayhaw, strawberry, pear. Sometimes a mix of berries if I don't have enough for a batch of one kind. I use the juice recipe in the Ball Blue Book. Pear juice is canned without any sugar because it's sweet enough. The others are sweetened to taste, or not at all. I frequently open a pint or quart jar and add to a pitcher of tea. Delicious. The only juice I was disappointed in was strawberry. It was good at first, but didn't hold flavor or color for more than a few months. Probably should have been frozen, but I ran out of freezer space. I haven't made the strawberry-lemonade concentrate because I prefer to add my juices to tea.

Started picking pears today...will let them ripen fully and make more juice. It is probably my favorite.

Jill

Wow, you're getting raspberries already in PA?? Early this year? Our blueberries are just starting to ripen, I figure July (instead of usual August) for brambles. Maybe I should check the old raspberry patch - I know the blackberries aren't even close, though a few of the Killarney raspberries I just planted early last month have green berries on them.

Jill...that is a great idea about just canning the "juice." I guess I was just focused on the lemonade concentrate since that's what I did the most recently. Having a pint of raspberry juice in the pantry to freshen up a freshly brewed gallon of iced tea just sounds ideal. I could add it to lemonade too if I wanted or just to some sparkling water to have a nice refreshing drink with all the benefits of the juice.

I haven't seen any blackberries starting to turn over yet but I picked a quart of black raspberries this morning. I know it's just getting ready to explode too...that's why I'm starting to prep recipes again.

Picked 14 pints yesterday morning, another 8 or so this morning from another patch. Jams and jellies and YUM! Good times ahead.