Goumi Juice

Like I mentioned in our last post, we have never gotten so many goumi berries at once before.

Goumi berry is a nitrogen fixing shrub with a medium sized single-stem branching habit in the family Elaeagnus multiflora, which produces edible red berries in early summer. The berries are sweet, slightly-to-moderately astringent with a chewy pit (the seed). We have typically considered them a garden snack, because we rarely get more than a few cups of them at a time. The kids will eat all the berries off of a bush in a single mid-morning snack.

However, this time we got a couple of quarts, and that wasn’t even picking the bushes clean. So we decided to steam juice them and see what happened.

Kathleen steamed these on Friday in her steam juicer. The first surprise was the color. It is not red at all. White! Who knew?

The second surprise was the volume. a couple of quarts of berries only yielded one cup of juice.

So she just canned it up as juice. We don’t have any recipes for jelly or anything in the Ball blue book or “Putting Food By,” as Goumis are not a traditional berry in American cuisine, though I believe they are used somewhat more in Europe. Not too sure about that.

We will see how the juice tastes and let you know. Maybe one of these years we will do some more experimenting, but the goumi season is already almost over for the year, so you might have to tune in next year for that.