Chokecherries Review and Juice Recipe - Weird Fruit Explorer Ep. 111 

How dare they complain of dirty nails!! Foraging the fruits is hard labor and dirty nails comes with the territory! I for one appreciate your nails Jared.

It's really sad to see a very interesting and informative channel not that popular. I love your information on different fruits, thank you. :)

Ahh Chokecherry trees. My parents have a wild one growing in the backyard. Growing up, there used to be whole rows of chokecherry trees along the side of a trail besides the neighbouring fields but the farmer decided to cut everything within six feet of the trail down because they were starting to branch out to closely due to growth. We would go out with those large white 4 Litre mayonnaise tubs from Costco and come back with at least two completely filled up with chokecherries. My parents would make wines with them and add raisins during fermentation for flavor and sweetness. The wines age well and reach their peak at around three years of age if I recall correctly but I could be wrong, it was more of their project and I only helped them bottle it. (The wine was for personal consumption within the family not for sales.)

Chokecherries are great for jam. Chokecherry jam is a personal favorite of mine.

Native American from Idaho here! We (our tribe) STILL make chokecherry jam, pudding, and it can be frozen for a nice snack. Chokecherry pudding is by far one of the best ways to make it :) PS just found your channel and I love it!

My grandmother used to make a syrup from chokecherries for use on pancakes through the winter when fresh fruit wasn't available. She did the same with saskatoons as well. As a kid, I would cheerfully gobble down either fruit by the handful, never thinking about how useful they might be if preserved. How our attitudes have changed with the "global village" making fruit easily available year round.

PS: you really need to try them when they are more ripe. When unripe like those you had they are so gross! But when they ripen fully, they are quite soft and very dark red almost black and the taste changes a lot. Your juice/jelly/wine etc will also be much much better if they are ripe.

I have lots of these in my yard some are really bitter and a few are sweet enough to eat without the dry mouth. I put them in the oven at 150 until the skin starts to pucker, it makes them really sweet to snack on

We have these things growing all over our yard, we've got like five separate bushes. I've never eaten them red, I always wait till they turn black, and then they really aren't bitter at all. They're mildly sweet, but if you wait till they've been ripe for a couple of weeks they get a little sweeter

A flashback to 5th grade where English teacher made us read The Hatchet, bloody gut cherries.

Man oh man, chokecherry jam is one of my favorite things. I pretty much can't stand cherries but the chokecherry has that sour that I love. The area I grew up made huckleberry and chokecherry jam. So so good.

"i also cleaned my nails" amazing

This reminds me of my poor 20's in Seattle. Found a guide of every fruit/nut on public lands in the city limits. Ate very well for a few years. Never saw anyone else picking.

When I was a kid we had chokecherry trees near the house. My stepmother and stepsister collected the chokecherries (wouldn't let the boys help) and then when winter came around they put it and a couple bags of sugar in a big crock behind the oil heater and covered it with a cheesecloth. It turned into chokecherry wine which smelled quite good.

I remember picking these by the gallon as a kid. We called them “ Capulin” and made them into jam, and wine. Super tart but really delicious.

I love trying new fruit! So glad to have found this channel :]

I grew up with these I LOVE them!!!!! Lol we used to have contests on who could eat the most. Good memories

I couldn’t love this channel or concept more... the coffee substitute videos are also awesome. That’s wild that your chokecherries weren’t sour.

My grandmother used to make chokecherry jelly. She would wait until the berries were black. It is some of the best jelly I've ever had.

Brill's app was very helpful for me navigating my local wild resources in college. Staten Island is a veritable larder of plant foods.

Always a useful and interesting channel

Awesome clean stove, and your hands are lovely! My grandma used to have us go pick these on the Pueblo. We made chokecherry jelly. Yum!

Damn, like a few seconds before you described the taste in the beginning, I thought of those exact same adjectives.

Steve seems like a really cool dude. You can tell he enjoys what he does.

We have a black chokecherry tree in our backyard. When picked fully ripe they do taste like black cherries. The astringent factor is caused by both the seeds and the skin. I just squirt the juice into my mouth instead of sucking on them since you negate the astringent factor that way. If you juice them, they make an excellent black cherry flavored jelly.

info warrior, good idea. I'll see if I can output higher, I film in HD but its lost in the editing.

"It is supposed to kill off some of that cyanide in there" ..... 😐

I love this channel.

I wish a guy like Steve could start tours in my hometown :)

@ethan the jigglypuff, I have a Kiwano Melon review filmed, but it won't be up for a couple months.

I like your curiousityshelf 👻👌🏻

I love these!

I made cranberry juice at home and I also got a sort of creaminess to it. not quite milk creaminess, but definitely not like the cranberry juice one would buy

have fond memories of chokecherries, gram made jelly from them where they grew at the summer house in upstate new york

Jared,They are Prunus Virginia, and there are many, many species. Here, in Alaska, we call them Mayflower tree, some times they are really look like Chockeberries, /Aronia/. Mainly, because some of them yield rather large size fruits. I wonder the one you harvested from what color of trunk did it have? There is a different between the yellow and grey trunk one. My favorite specie is the Canada red, it was cultivated obviously in Canada. Working for the City of Wasilla during the summer season, I eat so much from the moment it started to get dark color. They are very pretty trees, and I have some of those fruits in brandy for years. They are also hardy plants and with good pruning gorgeous, edible and healthy landscape pieces and great timber. Be aware of their fast growing, and fertile nature, if a sapling is not taken care in time, the parent plant can choke. Just like many other Prunus species the better the care, the better the fruit's taste. We have some in our Iditorad Park on the ponds bank, and other about 4 blocks away on the road side as filtering shade. The ones at the water side barely have any bitter taste, the others on the arid, or less irrigated spots are horrible. They are also having the hint of their "neighbor" plants taste, for example the ones with dandelion, skunk lily, ramsons or other wild garlic ground cover tend to be less enjoyable than the ones have currants, lingon berries etc. By the way, did you ever try a Tart or Sour Cherry, /Prunus cerasus/?; which is different cherry; if we talk about sour taste, gives as it gets, but no fear of poison. Sorry, I guess I run over my own mouth once again but seems I cannot help it. I applaud your New York buddy, being in the same business, City Foragers or City Truckers.

great one from the vault 👌🏻

Interesting video (as always) This is one I've always kind of overlooked, as I had always been told they were ornamental trees at best, now I may have to revisit them. I wonder if the creamy taste/texture is perhaps due to the presence of the high amount of pectin they are naturally abundant in, because judging from the appearance of the concentrate stage (after adding sugar and boiling) it probably would have gelled on its own had it been allowed to cool completely.

Love the wild taste of choke berries.

You should try the chokeberry as well, it is very astringent but makes awesome juice especially when mixed with apple juice!

As a child we picked these berries and my mother made syrup. I still love chokecherry syrup to this day.

We eat them off the tree while we are cutting and rolling the first hay crop. Them and mulberry are ripe during that time. Nice little snack. And if you have time the mulberry make a grate wine.

for a really long time i knew choke cherries as gut berries from gary paulsen's novel "Hatchet"

I loved chokecherries. Growing up in Wisconsin, I would eat them off the trees when very ripe.

Absolutely loved eating chokecherries off the tree, initially enjoying the taste, letting the astringency hit, spitting it out, forgetting the taste and wanting more

#weirdexplorer I like your channel because I get to see so many different kinds of fruits that I usually don't get see where I live.

We picked them red for jam and deeper for juice. All you have to do is add sugar and let it simmer and you'll have Jam.

I absolutely love the music in the intros to your videos. What songs are they?

I really like your videos on the more local flora, especially the "that's poisonous" said parents but turns out it's not. And other more "survival" type foods.

LMAO love how clean your stove looks now! Never heard of chokecherry, very intersting

cool song at the end

Just sampled a bit from my yard. It's like if cherries were tiny with huge seeds and zero sugar with a hint of feeling poisoned as it touches the tongue. Highly recommended if you're a masochist.

i love choke cherrys every summer the choke cherrys get ripe and i pick em of my yard

I love choke cherry jelly. My Grandma, used these for making pectin.

Here in montana we dont eat chokecherries until they are fully ripe which is when they turn almost black they are pretty good right off the three I used to go outside and eat them for hours. They also make very good to make syurp jam and sometimes even an ingredient in smoothies.

You should have skimmed it and then it would have gone from Pink like Pepto Bismol to cherry red.

My childhood was filled with chokecherry jam. we ate the ripe (black) chokecherries when we picked them. but not when they were red. we had a sieve that we mashed the seed and fruit to get pulp. but we NEVER used unripe berries

We have choke cherries in our garden - those are sweet, a bit astringent, a bit sour and not bitter at all. Very very good to make fruit drinks - tastes like a mix of cherry and red currant, you're right)) We don't mash them. We just boil them in waster and you get transparent red frui drink. Or You just put washed cherries into a glass jar - about 1/4-1/3 of volume - and then fill the rest with boiling water and a bit of sugar. After 15 minutes you need to put this water into a pot (without cherries) and reboil it, and fill the jar with cherries again. After that you can put a lid on a jar and save it for winter. Or wait until jar gets to room temperature and drink it))))

When ripe I regularly strip them off the bush and fill my mouth with them. Eat them one at a time and spit out the pit. Very tasty when ripe with the only flaw that they are astringent. Have made jam from them as well.

I have V. 'Jefferson' in the ground, that red color of your chokecherries reminds me of it. How about a series on the forageable plants on the highline? That's a nice day's walk.

methods of removing astringency in fruits include soaking, cooking and dehydrating. very astringent, inedible persimmon varieties become sweet and edible when dried.

This is really neat. I would never have thought that NYC had wild edibles growing all over the place, as long as you know where to look, very cool. Also Choke Cherries are such beautiful little berries. If you didn't know any better you would think they were a nice bunch of sweet, succulent Cherries or Red Grapes. That's a very deceptive little berry. Might be fun to put a bowl of them out for your freinds and play a little trick on them. 😉 Also, I'm now watching you prepare this juice and I'm thinking to myself, "oh, you made Pepto Bismal. Mmmm, looks so yummy...." 😐 I'm actually really surprised that it ended up tasting a lot better than it looked.

What kind of spoon is that you were using I quite like the colour of it

Nice video! there are choke cherries every where where I am during the summer. After trying them I just thought it's a shame this astringency is ruining this great little fruit. So I am pleased to hear that turning them into a juice gets rid of most of that and ends up a pleasant drink.

I love chokecherries (yes, I eat them raw), and jam and syrup from them if it's not over sweetened. The flavour is part of home for me. (Northcentral Alberta Canada). The native ones here are red when ripe. I recommend finding and tasting pin cherries, if you haven't yet.

how is this such an underrated episode

When I was a child, my mother made Chokecherry jam every year. We processed probably a hundred pounds of chokecherries every fall. They do taste a lot better when they are ripe.

I would recommend trying Prunus serotina also called Black cherry which is the sweeter better cousin of the chokecherry and it is more common than the chokecherry.

Liked just for the intro.

...Only clicked this cause I had a flashback to middle school reading The Hatchet. Its the gut cherries!

Ripe ones make great jelly. You can make brandy with them too.

My procrastination has no limits, from smartphones to rollercoasters, now to cherry video. 😂 (p.s. I do really love cherries tho)

chokecherries are the best our house had a chokecherry tree the chokecherries in a south dakota are sweet and sour not bitter. I have never seen the berries so large, the berries in south dakota are smaller. You need to try them from the dakotas.

What would be the song used at the beginning and end? I like the song. Very informative. I like the content as well

is the music in the background from the holy mountain?

I have a choke cherry tree in my back yard, but it's mostly to tall to be able to pick the fruit. And the birds usually get all the cherries that are close enough to reach. I'd love to be able to figure out a way to pick them that doesn't require a ladder. Do they have any picking tools that would work for something like this?

Autumn olives also come out creamy when you cook them. That was surprising the first time

have you did a review on kiwano melon

i have choke betrys near my sisters school they tatse quite good when they are near going of season not sure as it was a few years ago

Lol, i described it as kinda sweet dry mouth. Lol I made syrup with the ones i found that the birds hadnt devoured. Will probably try it on ice cream tonight

Have you tried rowan/mountain-ash?

hi Jared, always enjoy your fruit and travel vids, always informative and enjoyable, but would it he possible to upload you videos in a resolution greater than 480p? Thanks for all your efforts.

We had a chokecherry growing in our yard in Winnipeg when I was growing up. The birds LOVED the ripe cherries...in August and early September when the fruit were at their ripest, you'd see bird crap for miles with the seeds in it (seed dispersal agents!). But for us humans, the tree (it got to about 20 feet tall) was a bit of a pain...you see, it didn't really want to be a tree at all, but a shrub, so every year it would send up hundreds of suckers into the lawn (in a radius of about 4-5 feet), each one requiring some significant effort to dispatch (I personally didn't care if the tree became shrubby, but my parents...they wanted a tree, NOT a shrub). I'd eat the berries off the tree occasionally...I'd get used to the astringency and actually enjoy them after awhile. And I think we made jelly once. But the fruit were most useful for pranking people thinking that I was giving them nice, sweet blueberries. The name CHOKEcherry is appropriate here - there was certainly a LOT of choking. Oh, I never saw cherries that red before, even unripe...they were dark burgundy when they first grew, before darkening further to near-black. Must be a different variety of chokecherry. Also, our cherries never got that big...the biggest I saw were MAYBE in the 1 cm diameter range, most of which was seed.

What is the enticing intro song?

*sigh* I miss the chokecherry jelly that a gal in Siskiyou County CA made when I was growing up. It was absolutely phenomenal.... :( That, and starthistle honey...

They make jam out of it in Santa Fe NM

we have some of these in our neighborhood.

Do you have a video comparing Acerola and Chokecherries? I've tried researching on my own but, for me at least, information has been extremely difficult to find....

chokecherry jam is the best thing ever

your reaction to the taste of the berry was the same as mine.lol

Spread on a pan and cooked at 150 until the skin starts to pucker and they sweeten up and the astringent goes away. I have a few in my yard that are sweet right off the tree, like any wild fruit they vary from tree to tree. Also the poison in the seed is the same that is in other cherrys, peaches, apples, almonds, and many others so don't worry much about it and as long as you don't chew any of the seeds from any of those it will just pass right through you.

Cool

One year a huge chokecherry tree fell. It was loaded with chokecherries, we picked a big bucket. I found a recipe for chokecherry jelly. It was the best jelly I ever had. Too hard to pick a bucket from standing trees. Yes, be sure the chokecherries are black.

What's the name of this old intro song?

Chokecherries are awesome… we have them growing wild here in Nova Scotia, Canada… I make jelly with them every summer. You have to make jelly and not jam because there is some sort of toxin in the seed that you can’t eat. I’d gladly send you a jar to try for your show if you want. Just let me know what the shipping address is. Leave me an email address to contact you about it if your interested.

Can we get you some decent cookware, bowls, spoons, a proper spatula?

We had a tree in our yard, child me had a rough moment thinking they were like store-bought cherries ':D

The chokecherries in Maryland are much smaller. They would ferment on the ground, and birds would get drunk. Yes, the pits are going to be toxic: They are part of the same family as almonds.

You should try some elaeagnus berries. I've enjoyed those since I was a young boy.

What is the song in the intro?

i like that pot