"Pick-your-own" strawberries

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ChrisGreaves
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"Pick-your-own" strawberries

Post by ChrisGreaves »

The warm weather has arrived up here and with it Strawberry Season.

I just LOVE the pick-your-own concept so yesterday I set off to pick-my-own at a facility not 20 minutes walk from my gritty city downtown apartment.

That’s right.
“No Frills” on Parliament Street.

In Canada, or at least, the bit I know (Toronto) strawberries are grown in shallow wooden containers inside supermarkets; these containers are “seeded” in a manner of speaking by university graduates who trolley in the strawberries from some room out the back where they have been deposited by grizzled 18-wheeler rig drivers who, I suspect, play C.W. McCall on a cassette player for 53 hours non-stop all the way from Bakersfield.

At two dollars per pound that’s less than four cents per hour; pretty good deal!

So I bring ‘em home and rinse them and cut strange green stuff (leaves? stalks?) off ‘em and pop them in the fridge in their clear plastic lidded shell, and the next day I take out, oh, say about a quarter pound and chop each berry into four or six pieces, dump them into a bowl, sprinkle regular sugar on them using – and this is important – the LARGE teaspoon and settle down with “The Chairs are Where the People Go”.
Now I don’t know what made me do it or how it came to happen, but I appear to have managed to get the teeniest tiniest bit of salt on the strawberries.
Not a lot.
I mean, it couldn’t have been a lot because all I had was the last of a set of those little sachets of salt, the kind you are likely to absent-mindedly let drop into your pocket when you wander into the Harvey’s on Yonge Street at St Clair to see if there is a big line-up for the burger-and-fries 2-for-1 special (there always is!) and wander out again.
“Salted away”, that’s what I should have said in stead of “let drop”.
Well, anyway, off to the couch and I take the first teaspoon of crisp strawberry chunks and there are maybe three, no more, grains of salt on the berry and I have to tell you, it is the most exquisite taste of strawberries I have ever tasted in 70 years, including seven years growing my own on a 20’x20’ plot in Gawler S.A.
Seriously: Try It.
But honestly: you want to sprinkle on so little salt that you’ll think you’ve put on none at all.
I’m guessing that the acidic strawberries get a bit more acid released by the NaCl. Either that or the NaCl reacts with something in the strawberry juice to make a novel chemical.

(signed) "An old salt" of Toronto
An expensive day out: Wallet and Grimace

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BobH
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Re: "Pick-your-own" strawberries

Post by BobH »

You get a similar effect with pineapple. Peel and large dice your pineapple. Pour over just enough EVOO to give a very light coating. Sprinkle the lightest bit of sea salt on them and mix thoroughly. Spoon into a serving size bowl. Sit. Enjoy.
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ChrisGreaves
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Re: "Pick-your-own" strawberries

Post by ChrisGreaves »

BobH wrote:You get a similar effect with pineapple. Peel and large dice your pineapple. Pour over just enough EVOO to give a very light coating. Sprinkle the lightest bit of sea salt on them and mix thoroughly. Spoon into a serving size bowl. Sit. Enjoy.
Thanks Bob, but Olive Oil on pineapple?
Regardless I'll have to give this a miss because raw pineapple doesn't agree with me.
But I will be trying a grain or two of salt on other raw fruits as the summer progresses. :cheers:
An expensive day out: Wallet and Grimace

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BobH
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Re: "Pick-your-own" strawberries

Post by BobH »

Yes, olive oil on pineapple!

I don't have the vocabulary to explain this, but the effect if amazing. You mustn't over do it with the oil. Use just enough to get some on each piece.
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Intel Core i5, 3570K, 3.40 GHz, 16 GB RAM, ECS Z77 H2-A3 Mobo, Windows 10 >HPE 64-bit, MS Office 2016