Last summer I tasted a mulberry for the very first time, actually that was the first time I ever even seen a mulberry other than in a book or on tv. Unbeknownst to me, I had driven by a huge mulberry tree for practically my entire life. I probably still wouldn’t know it was a mulberry tree if Miss Cindy hadn’t become the owner of the tree when she moved to the area to be closer to us.
When the mulberries ripened a couple of weeks ago I made mulberry juice with some of the berries. The process couldn’t be easier and the juice couldn’t be better.
First I washed the mulberries; then I placed them in a large stockpot; added water until I could just see it coming up through the berries; and then cooked them for about 20 minutes.
Next I ran the mulberries through my handy dandy ricer. Once I had extracted all the juice from the berries I discarded them and poured the juice through a fine sieve a few times to remove all the mulberry seeds.
I poured the strained juice back into my cleaned stockpot and added sugar to taste.
I googled around and found a few mulberry juice recipes, but the amount of sugar they called for seemed like the sweetness would take over the mulberry taste. So I added sugar until I decided it tasted right.
After the sugar was added, I cooked the mixture until it thickened slightly then allowed it to cool to room temperature before pouring it into quart jars to store in the frig.
The juice is actually a concentrate. About a quarter cup of mulberry juice (more/less depending on your taste) mixed with cold water makes it just right-and it makes the juice last longer which is a good thing since it tastes so so good.
Come back in a day or so and I’ll share a story about Pap and mulberries with you.
To see how to make mulberry jelly go here.
Tipper
Thanks,what a very informative article.
Mulberries were one of the things grown sparsely on our farm (wild, a tree or two) that we were warned “not to eat,” and I can’t ever remember trying them. I think we children got the idea the fruit was “poison.” I never did investigate to find that worms were secreted within the berries! Maybe that’s why Mother and Daddy warned us against eating them! I enjoyed seeing your mulberry juice-making and reading all these posts! I learned something I didn’t know about the lowly mulberry!
Pam-thank you for the comments! Yes mulberries do taste similar to blackberries : )
Judy-thank you for the comment! YUM all your suggestions sound good : )
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of summer Saturdays at the cemetery where my grandparents were buried. While my parents tended the gravesite plantings, my friend and I enjoyed picking mulberries. It was the only place I ever recall seeing mulberry trees. Thanks for bringing this pleasant childhood memory to mind. Your juice sounds yummy!
Mulberry lemonade or tea? How about mixed with Sprite or club soda for a little fizz?
I’m so jealous!!! We had Mulberry Trees at a house we lived at a while back. One of my favorite spring time activities was pulling a chair beneath them to sit and eat the berries – seeds, stem and all (hey, it’s what we use to call roughage which is called fiber nowadays) – until I had my fill for the day. They’re luscious. Now it leaves your fingers, lips and tongue a bright purple for days, but the enjoyment makes that worth it.
Bro Tom found two growing in a ditch near where we live now. He dug them up and planted them in our yard, and they’re doing fine, although I don’t know how long it will take them to put out berries.
Praying for a safe blessed week for everyone.
God bless.
RB
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Mmmm-mmmm. That mulberry juice sure looks good! Does it taste like blackberry?
Pam
scrap-n-sewgranny.blogspot.com
Growing up, the lady across the road (only other house within a mile) had a huge mulberry bush. Every summer we would pick as many as we could reach and sometimes Mom brought the oilcloth from the kitchen table and spread it on the ground and my sister and I could then “climb” the branches to shake down the ones we couldn’t reach. We took some of the bounty to the Mrs. Scherer (she was already 90 years old) and took the rest home to be turned into cobbler or crisps. I don’t recall worrying about or seeing worms but those cobblers did have a good amount of “grit” to them from the seeds. Even so, we enjoyed mulberry cobbler season, including (the now probably politcally incorrect) playing “Indian” or “movie star” by painting our faces with the berries. That “warpaint” had a way a staying around in spite of a good scrubbing and we usually got in trouble for it; but for some inexplicable reason, we did it repeatedly anyway!
Tipper:
I suppose that Jim Casada is right. I ate my share of mulberries (and worms) when I was a kid. Not too many trees around now, but there were a couple of big ones at my paternal grandparents farm.
I would climb up in that tree and sometimes in the peach trees and eat a “bait” of them. Unfortunately, the mulberries were in the pasture and the mules ate the bark from the trees and finally killed them, although they were huge.
Thanks for rekindling the memories from years past.
L. Woodrow Ross
When I was living at Needmore we had a huge Mulberry tree in our pasture near the river. I could hardly wait for the fruit to ripen and if there were worms in the berries they didn’t seem to harm me. Mom used to make Mulberry Jelly and Jam and I loved both on a hot biscuit with homemade butter. There was another Mulberry tree across the river that hung out over the river, when the berries dropped fish gathered under the tree and ate them. I’ve used the berries as bait and caught several kinds of fish including Catfish, Carp and Hog Suckers, I loved the Catfish and our hogs loved the others. I’ll have to make a trip back out to the farm to see if there are any Mulberries still there since as Marcel Ledbetter said about Uncle Versy’s Mustard Sardines “you’ve flung a cravin on me”.
Tipper,
When I come in today, I opened the door and there was the mama cat’s daughter. On her other side was a Snake all stretched out about 2 feet long. I recon they had decided to not bother each other, but that didn’t work for me. I quickly got a hoe out of my Jeep and pecked it in the head. Then I told Whisky to get him. My little dog was just waiting his turn, so he grabbed that balled-up mess and run outside with it. Soon as he got outside, “flibity, flibity, flop, and snake went everywhere. Reminded me of our Fiests when I was a kid. One Snake less!
Jim’s comment tickled me, that’s another way to increase your Protein. Lordy, that won’t hurt you, ain’t no telling what I ate when I use to eat Dirt. I got a Chinquapin
tree that almost guarantees a small worm in every bunch. …Ken
Remember this little ditty from our childhood (1st & 2nd)
♬ Here we go round the mulberry bush
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush
Here we go round the mulberry bush
Looking for a worm! Yuck! ♪ ♫
I was always told not to eat mulberries off the ground because they might have worms in them. We would always spread a worn out sheet or something on the ground then shake the limbs. Or rake all the fallen berries before we started shaking the tree. I got the same warning with all fallen fruit. I was always told “If you pick up an apple off the ground it will always have a worm in it. If you see the worm, eat around it. If you don’t see the worm, you already ate it.”
Did you know blackberries all have little spiders on them? I always blow mine before I eat them.
The FDA has a website that explains how much and why a percentage of “foreign material” is allowed in food.
If a person is afraid they might be ingesting tiny creatures (and their droppings) they shouldn’t ever buy food from a store. If you grow all your own food you must realize every bit of it comes in contact with DIRT. And Dirt is dirty, right?
My mother always sifted all her cornmeal before she used it. Not only to remove bran and the bigger pieces of corn that didn’t get ground up good. It was also to remove weevils and check for mouse poop. Nowdays with bolted or self rising cornmeal that step is skipped. It’s done at the mill. The mill has to go by FDA rules (refer to the FDA website.)
What you gonna do? You gotta eat!
After reading Jim Casada’s post on wormy mulberries,I now know why the old people said I would get worms.Ate them anyway.They were too hard to resist.
Mulberry jam.Yum,yum.
LG
Mulberry trees are very uncommon in this area, but my dad had one. He was a lover of all kinds of trees, so he pondered and attempted to search out the Mulberry tree seedlings. He even had his doctor interested in finding a seedling to plant.
There was an old picnic table out to itself on Dad’s land. He brush hogged or mowed around, but never moved it, As time went on it was never used, because folks in the country just don’t have time to sit at a picnic table. It became a favorite landing place for birds and was sometimes used to hold garden vegetables from the big garden.
I remember well when he thought he had hit pay dirt. Seedlings were found all around the table, and had apparently sprang up from bird droppings. He actually took one to his doc who tried to grow it first in a huge pot. I always think of this whenever I fight unwanted blackberry briers that spring up through my Rhododendrons.
I was very amused at Jim’s post! As a child I was too finicky to eat a lot of meat, but I daresay I got most of my protein from apples and chestnuts. There was not a lot of sprays used back then.
Mulberry trees grew everywhere when I was growing up. Mom told us not to ever eat them, but I can’t remember if she thought they were poison or some other reason. She picked, cooked and preserved any wild fruit she could get her hands on, except mulberries. That didn’t stop me from eating them when they dropped from the huge trees. I asked my brother-in-law if he had seen any of the trees around here, as I craved their unique taste I remember from so many years ago. He said he had seen some but the birds eat them as soon as they get ripe. The nursery I order from offered a buy one get one free sale on their mulberry trees this year. I ordered two and was horrified when they arrived. They measured one and half inches long! They are still living and have grown an inch or two since April.
Tipper (and Miss Cindy)—Your musings on mulberries just offered too much temptation for me to resist. If you’ll carefully dissect the mulberries, you will discover that almost every one of them has a tiny white worm or two inside. I learned this as a boy when we had a fine mulberry tree on the lower end of the hillside below the house. I came in one day with a belly full of mulberries and tell-tale evidence of my consumption of them on my lips.
Daddy shook his head and said: “I see you’ve been eating worms.”
When I inquired as to what he meant he told me that almost every mulberry has worms. Sure enough, I did a careful examination and he was right. Mind you, Daddy could be finicky and times and I didn’t have that problem. I kept right on eating them, merely adding a bit of protein to my boyhood diet and figuring that if you are what you eat the the worms were essentially a mulberry. Or, to put it another way, I have no problem with feasting on chickens or fish, and both of them relish worms. The only different between that and eating mulberries is that with the latter you are taking one step out of the process and consuming the worm directly.
Now I reckon I’ve gone and ruint Monday, but temptation lured me too strongly.
Jim
Tipper,I’ll bet that is really good juice.Never had that.My brother makes mulberry jam,which is very good.He removes all the stem he can and uses the rest.I guess you could call that a high fiber jam.
Early season squirrel hunters look for mulberry trees.Squirrels love em.
I mostly hear mulberry pronounced maberry.
LG
The juice you gave me is very tasty!
As a child , we had a bungalow along the Jersy shore and in the back yard we had the biggest mulberry tree. The berries were always plentiful and despite the seeds, the fruit was always sweet. My parents never did anything to the tree, like fertilization. However, I remember the birds making a mess with their enjoyment of its fruit. My dad and uncle would trim its huge branches every summer. Thanks for giving me a great childhood memory. I wonder if it is still there.
Gosh that looks delicious. Bet your chickens enjoyed the cooked berries, too!