how to preserve juneberries Archives

It’s almost saskatoon season here in this part of Canada and it can be a bit of a game of chance if we’re going to have an overabundant harvest or nothing at all. It’s always a race to harvest the saskataoons on our bush before the birds do, but the birds are much more efficient than I am.

I distinctly remember one Saturday evening a couple years ago where the saskatoons were near perfect ripeness and I said to myself “I’ll harvest these tomorrow morning before the birds get to them.” When I went out with my harvesting bowl a mere 18 hours later, the bush had been stripped bare of saskatoons and we had a grand harvest of about half a cup. (The year before this, we had harvested somewhere around six litres.)

If I’m particularly determined to enjoy saskatoons and the birds have beaten me to it, there are parks nearby with plenty of saskatoon bushes that I could raid. These berries tend to be smaller than the ones I have here, but they’re just as delicious and just as abundant.

On a year where we get a small harvest, we don’t bother with figuring out how to preserve or cook or use the berries—we just pull them out as a snack at a barbecue. But on those years where we get six litres or more, we need a list of recipes so that we make the most of those saskatoons!

From my understanding, saskatoons are more of a regional name for these berries. Depending on where you are, you may know these as juneberries or serviceberries. When looking for recipes online, you’ll likely have better search results using these other more common names.

Baking recipes

While I don’t tend to bake with saskatoons, I think it would be fair to say that most people’s first thought of what to do with saskatoons is to make pie or other baked goods—so let’s start with some of these!

Saskatoon pie

It’s very likely every Canadian prairie family has their own variation on the traditional Saskatoon pie. This is my step-dad’s recipe, which makes two pies:

Crust ingredients:

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cups margarine or shortening
1 large egg

1 tablespoon vinegar

Crust instructions:

Knead flour and margarine to make a fairly dry and loose crumble.

Add egg and vinegar and knead until it forms a stiff dough. Add a splash of water if needed to keep the dough rollable and workable.
Divide into two parts and roll out two bottoms and two tops.

Pie ingredients:

8 cups saskatoons, cleaned and stemmed
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Pie instructions:

Place bottom crusts in two 9-inch pie plates and trim edges.
Place 4 cups berries in each pie.
Mix flour, sugar, and cinnamon and pour half of mixture over each pie. Sprinkle a tablespoon of lemon juice over the berries in each pie.

Moisten the rims of the crusts. Place top crust on each pie and crimp-seal around the edges, trimming off excess. Make a small hole in the top of the crust to allow steam to escape.
Bake at 350 F for 45 minutes or until pie looks done.
Serve as-is or with ice cream.

More baked goods

In my searching for recipes I stumbled upon this great site with a whole list of saskatoon berry baked goods, including biscuits, breads, turnover, and more.

Preserving recipes

As this blog likely indicates, I’m a fan of preserving food so we can enjoy it throughout the year. There are, unfortunately, surprisingly few saskatoon preservation recipes, but I’ve got a couple to get you started.

Preserving saskatoons in kombucha

This is a recipe of my own invention and it turned out remarkably well.

A few years back I had started exploring fermentation methods of preserving blueberries, attempting both a salt fermentation and a kombucha fermentation.

After succeeding with that—and liking the kombucha fermentation better—I decided to try the same with saskatoons. And, thankfully, it worked! With this kombucha fermentation, I was able to keep delicious saskatoons in my fridge for weeks, impressing my saskatoon-loving family members who thought the season was long gone.

You can find my recipe for kombucha-fermented saskatoons here.

Saskatoon jam

Perhaps the most common home preservation choice when it comes to saskatoons is to make jam.

The Bernardin website has a great recipe for saskatoon jam, found here.

Alcohol recipes

One of my favourite garden produce projects is to turn food into alcohol. At any given time I have anywhere from four to eight different types of wines stocked away and a few different liqueurs. When we have guests over, this makes for a very impressive (and delicious) accompaniment to dinner.

Saskatoon wine

Last year I attempted my first batch of Saskatoon wine using this recipe.

It turned out very delicious, but my main learning from the project was to wait until fermentation fully stops rather than following directions to the letter. I had bottled the wine when directed, but fermentation hadn’t finished and had continued while in the bottle. Upon opening, two of our bottles gushed upward like a geyser, even striking the ceiling once. It was a mess to clean up. (In hindsight, I could have used a Campden tablet to cease fermentation before bottling, but I generally don’t use them.)

It’s a recipe I will make again and once I’ve mastered it (and perhaps tweaked it a bit), I’ll have a version here on the website.

Saskatoon liqueur

On the same site I’ve already linked to twice in this post, I also came across a saskatoon liqueur recipe that could be described as saskatoon schnapps. You can find that recipe here.

If I can manage to get the saskatoons before the birds this year and have a large harvest, I’ll give this a try too!

More food preserving recipes

If you haven’t already checked out my new cookbook, Preserving Your Urban Harvest, please do so! It includes 73 recipes to preserve 21 garden favourite crops, including saskatoons!

The cover of Preserving Your Urban Harvest

Each produce has two to four recipes, to help get your started on your food preservation and urban homesteading journey. The saskatoon section includes the above kombucha-fermented saskatoons and a saskatoon and Grand Marnier jam.

Saskatoons are a blink-and-you’ll-miss-them crop.

We have a large saskatoon bush in our front yard. About a week ago, I was looking at the bush on a Saturday afternoon. The berries were starting to ripen—they’re perfect when they’re so dark-purple that they’re almost black—and decided I’d start picking the ripest ones the following day.

Well, Sunday morning rolls around and I head outside to discover that the birds had stripped the entire bush in less than twenty-four hours. Not only did they eat all of the ripe and almost-ripe berries, but they ate all of the completely-unripe berries too.

I had plans for those berries. I make a super-tasty saskatoon and Grand Marnier jam that some friends look forward to every year, and I had hoped to try making a batch of saskatoon wine.

Thankfully, a family member came to the rescue. He knows a good spot to find wild saskatoons and not long after the birds had devastated my crop, I was handed buckets and buckets of berries. I had enough for the jam and the wine, with plenty left over.

“Saskatoons” is apparently a very regional name for these berries. Whenever I would search for Saskatoon recipes online, the options were extremely limited—basically just pies or jam. My husband and I aren’t really dessert people and I’ve never baked a pie in my life, so I never knew what to do with these and we’d just eat them as-is.

One day I encountered a blog post about something called serviceberries and there was an off-hand anecdote in the post about how some people know them as saskatoons or juneberries. Suddenly I had the key to finding more recipes and posts about this little short-season fruit.

If you’ve never had saskatoons before, I sort of think of them as similar to a blueberry. However, that similarity is more in the size, shape, and colour, though to me the taste isn’t super dissimilar.

My saskatoon bush produces nice, plump, juicy berries. The wild ones are considerably smaller, as is often the case with wild versus cultivated fruit.

Back to the cooking adventure:

After making the jam (which I didn’t photograph, so I won’t get a blog post about it this year, but if you’re curious, it’s this recipe), setting up the wine (which I’ll post about in several months when it’s ready to drink so I can also comment on taste), and flavouring a batch of kombucha with saskatoons and blueberries, I was still left with more saskatoons than I knew what to do with.

I decided to give preserving them a try. It had worked well with blueberries, so theoretically I might get the same result with saskatoons.

I pulled up the recipe and set out to experiment. The photos in this post are of a double-batch of the recipe at the bottom.

To start, mix unflavoured kombucha, sugar, salt, and water together and set aside. Rinse the berries and then put them into the fermentation jar. Pour the brine on top, make sure everything is submerged (preferably with a weight), close it (with an airlock), and let it sit for a few days. Taste it daily until desired doneness, which for us was three days, same as with the blueberries.

This was a bit of a disaster in the process, requiring quick thinking to make things work.

The first is that since I wanted a double batch, it was too much for my fermentation kit. That was easy enough to solve—I’ll just use a bigger jar.

I got everything mixed up and put inside. When I went to put the fermentation weight on top of the berries, that was my next problem—the weight was designed for a wide-mouth jar and I was using a standard-mouth jar. I also didn’t have any wide-mouth jars on hand to just switch jars.

You can usually use a ziplock bag filled with water as a weight, but there wasn’t much room in the jar, so I decided to risk it and skip the weight. I made sure to stir the mixture with a spoon every twelve hours or so, to push the top berries underneath so nothing was floating on top too long.

Then came the problem with the lid. The fermentation lid, similar to the weight, was manufactured for a wide-mouth jar, so it didn’t fit the jar I was using. Luckily I have some wine-making equipment on hand, so I poked a hole in a mason jar lid and stuck an airlock in it. (In the absence of that, the next best thing would be to loosely put on a two-part mason jar lid. Theoretically, the weight of the lid would keep it down and keep out unwanted air, but also be loose enough to allow gas build-up inside to release.)

All potential disasters overcome, the project succeeded.

Once the berries are ready and fully fermented, I replaced the makeshift airlock lid with a regular lid and stuck it in the fridge. If you’re using a fermentation kit, you might want to transfer the berries to a new jar to free up the kit for the next fermentation project.

The fully fermented berries are wonderful on their own. The kombucha sugar brine gives it a sweet juicy taste, and as they continue to ferment (albeit more slowly) in the fridge, they may develop a fizzy texture felt on the tongue when eating them—some folks dislike this and some enjoy this.

Other than eating them straight out of the jar, they make a great topping for yogurt, ice cream, overnight oats, or any other food where you want a little bit of fresh fruit mixed in.

Even if the birds hadn’t stripped my berries in under twenty-four hours, the saskatoon season is so incredibly short. Last year, the birds left the bush alone and I got to harvest the berries—I got buckets of them off only one bush—and we enjoyed our saskatoon harvest for about a week and a half. After that, they were finished with until this year.

This spring we planted two more saskatoon bushes in our yard. Either we’ll have so many berries that even if the birds raid a bush we’ll still have some for ourselves, or we’ll just attract more birds and they’ll all know our yard is the place to be. As frustrating as it is to have the birds abscond with the harvest, we do appreciate that someone enjoyed the berries, even if it can’t be us.

Sugar-Brine Fermented Saskatoons (Serviceberries, Juneberries)

With sugar, kombucha, and a few other ingredients, saskatoons (also known as serviceberries or juneberries) can be easily fermented and last for weeks in the fridge.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 5

Fermenting Time 3

Course: Fruit

Cuisine: Fruit

Ingredients Equipment Method Notes

Ingredients

2 cups Saskatoons / Serviceberries / Juneberries
6 Tbsp Kombucha, unflavoured

¾ tsp Salt
6 Tbsp Sugar
9 Tbsp Water

Equipment

1 Fermenting Jar or Fermenting Kit See notes for alternatives

Method

Mix all ingredients except for the berries.
Clean berries and then put them in the fermentation jar.

Pour the kombucha-sugar mixture on top.
Put the fermentation weight on top of the saskatoons. Attach an airlock or loosely-fitted lid.
After twenty-four hours, taste-test daily until desired doneness. For us, we determined this was after three days, but the length of time will vary based on the temperature in your kitchen and various other factors.
Transfer to a clean jar and store in the fridge.
I'm not sure of the shelf life, but the jar in our fridge has been there a month and they're still good.

Notes

A fermentation kit usually has a jar, a weight, and an airlock. This is the one I have and it worked perfectly for this. (I can’t find it on Amazon, but if you’re in Canada, I got it at Canadian Tire. Alternatively, here’s a more expensive and more complete kit from the same company available on Amazon, though it looks like it’s several lids and weights but you provide your own jar.) If you don’t have a fermentation kit, you can use any jar that’s big enough to hold all of this, and then use a Ziplock bag filled with water as a weight. You might get scum forming on the bag and that’s okay.

Tag: how to preserve juneberries

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