Frozen blackberries on a tray

Blackberries are £13.27 a kilo at Sainsbury’s right now. That’s madness when there are so many growing wild in the hedgerows. Nobody living outside of a city has any excuse for buying them at that price, and even those in the middle of London could probably get a train ticket out to the countryside to pick their own for less than the price of a decent bag of fruit.

Besides, picking blackberries is one of the best things about autumn. Just as the sound of tennis balls on rackets and cricket balls on willow are the sounds of summer, so blackberries dropping into a sandwich box are one of the finest sounds of autumn.

We went blackberry picking last weekend and came home with a bumper crop, but with a busy week between then and now we’ve not had time to do anything with them. So we’ve frozen them ready for some late-season jam making.

It’s tempting to freeze the whole box of berries as they are, but there are two problems with this. The first is that the weight of the fruit will crush the berries at the bottom of the box before they ever get frozen. The second is that all of the fruit will freeze in one big block. This is bad for two reasons: first, it makes them difficult to separate when you don’t want to use them all at once (particularly as the juice from the crushed berries will also freeze and fuze them together) and second, they will freeze more slowly, and you really want to freeze them as quickly as you can to keep them fresh.

So it is crucial when preserving fruit this way to spread it out across a large tray or two and freeze it in a single layer. They will freeze more quickly, and can be retrieved individually.

Don’t be tempted to wash them before freezing, or they will freeze wet and stick to the tray. Pulling them off can then remove the tray’s surface and make them unusable. Instead, wait until you defrost them, and wash them then.

Our berries went into the freezer within two hours of picking, which is ideal, and once frozen we removed them from the trays and bagged them up. They can now happily sit it out in the freezer until next week when we plan on making some bramble jelly, bulking up the mix by adding in the berries left over from last year. They are testament to the success of freezing this way: they’ve been perfectly preserved now for a full 12 months.

Related posts:

1. How to boil (and freeze) beetroot
2. We’re enjoying a garden fruit glut
3. Pruning the fruit bushes