But to make it worthy for a Weekend Herb Blogging submission, I give you a good tip for cleaning sea-buckthorn berries. You see, sea-buckthorn branches are prickly shrubs, and the berries are quite soft. Picking them individually from the branches is a difficult, messy, painful and wasteful task. It's best to cut off berry-laden branches from the tree, remove superfluous leaves and smaller berry-free branches with scissors, wash and drain the branches, and throw them into your deep freezer for 24 hours. Then remove the branches from the freezer, and pick off the berries - as they are frozen, they come off very easily now.
Keep the berries in the deep freezer. For an excellent refreshing smoothie, blitz a handful of frozen berries in a blender, mix with water, press through a fine sieve and sweeten with sugar. Or make this sorbet:
Sea Buckthorn Sorbet
(Astelpajusorbee)
200 ml water
200 ml sugar
400 ml sea-buckthorn juice, preferably freshly extracted
You can either use shop-bought good-quality sea-buckthorn juice, or make your own. To make your own, wash about a cup of sea-buckthorn berries and puree in a blender. Press through a fine sieve. Then take some boiling water and pour over the sea-buckthorn pulp on the sieve to extract more juice. Continue, until you've got 400 ml liquid. (Using boiling water helps to extract more 'juice matter' from the pulp).
Pour water and sugar into a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes to make a syrup. Cool.
Mix sea-buckthorn juice and syrup and churn in your ice cream maker according to the instructions. (We gave it 25 minutes in a Kitchen Aid ice cream attachment).
Put in the freezer to harden a little before serving.
WHB: This is also my entry to the Weekend Herb Blogging, this time hosted by Kalyn herself. Click on the logo below for more information about this established foodblogging event.
- Follow RecipesDream
- Follow @us
