It's now time to pick the sea buckthorns, our name-giving plants delicious and vitamin-filled berries. I've read that one sea buckthorn berry contains 15 times more vitamin C than an orange! So even though it is rather tedious and sometimes painful due to the thorns to pick those berries, we did so with pleasure. And well, my Mom helped a lot, so that was a big help!
The harvest was rather small this year, not many trees had berries in them, so the harvest itself went rather quickly. We only got a few litres of them, so I decided to make the most of what I had. Here's what I did:
First, I took a good litre of berries to be frozen as-is, as complete berries. That's easy and we can use them however we like during the winter. Many Finns eat a few berries every day like medicine. Maybe we will do that too.
The rest I ran through our Bosch MUM kitchen machine (Amazon Uk, Amazon DE). I used the shredding blade to break the berries and get as much juice out of them as I possibly could. The berry skins and seeds were captured above the shredding blade and I took them into a separate bowl for the next step. I got about 1,5 litres of direct pressed sea buckthorn juice using this method. It all went into the freezer.
In the next step I took the skins and seeds and made a second batch of juice with them using the cooking method. Basically I took the berries, some water, bit of sugar and brought the mixture to a boil. I let it boil for a few minutes and then sieved the seeds and skins out again. Using this method I got another 1,5 litres of (milder & sweeter) juice.
And then I dried the remaining seeds and skins in our bit-cooled-down masonry oven to be used in a muesli. I would say I did my very best in trying to get as much out of our little sea buckthorn harvest (not to mention I also dried some leaves for tea)! What would have you done with them, had it been your harvest?
