North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Alan Haigh" <alandhaigh@gmail.com>]

I've noticed a lot of posts lately about various ribes and their uses and members favorites.  In my orchard ribes have been widely tested with probably about 50 different varieties of gooseberries, red, white, and black currants and gooseberry and currant crosses.  In the end none of these plants is terribly important to me if only because they ripen right at the fever pitch of the growing season and I barely have time to deal with them before they are shriveling on the bush or have passed through the digestive tracks of my busy birds.

 

At some future time when all I have to manage is my 3 acres and I've retired from the responsibility of tending scores of the home and estate orchards of other people I will return to only one kind of ribes, that being black currants.  Gooseberries are pleasant but bland, red currants are beautiful but also lacking in aromatics and whites aren't even beautiful and no taste improvement over the reds.  Black currants to my taste buds are so much more complex and interesting than these others they should be considered an entirely different category.

 

I realize that this is a minority opinion on this list but apparently not in the rest of the currant producing world where black currants are cultivated much more extensively according to numbers I came up with while searching the web.  I think this says a lot for the culinary potential of the blacks.

 

I have found that even the least pleasing blacks off the plant, such as Crusader with it's intense cat piss aroma and relatively low sugar- high acid balance, are extremely useful in the kitchen for sauces, juice blends and preserves.  For a quick example run a cup of blacks through a blender with a quart of fresh pressed apple "cider", strain coarsely and drink and let me know what you think.  Compare that to the same recipe using any gooseberry and you may side with me. 

 

The strong taste of blacks may require cooking and/or a lot of sugar to balance out but when used to their advantage they are much more interesting and delicious to my palate than those other ribes most of the world puts on the B-list.  They are also more nutritious and I suspect much higher in anti-oxidants.