The Art of Foraging: Irish Wildberries

Nowadays, Urban foraging has found it's way into the lexicon of ingredients of many bartenders and mixologists. Just a brief stroll down the roadand you can find the most wonderful ingredients to work with! You just need to know how to spot them, and but more importantly, how to utilize them and their flavours to your advantage to make a delectable drink!

In this post, I'll be talking about the infamous Irish Wild Berries often overlooked but are a great addition to any cocktail. Ireland is home to many edible wild plants and berries, perfect to forage to add some uniqueness to your cocktail. During these unprecedented times, I have chosen to challenge myself to forage any ingredients I could (within my 2/5km). Showing that these ingredients are accessible to almost anyone and with these ingredients I created cocktails from nature to glass. These berries usually grow in fields or on brambles in hedgerows.

The book Wild Food Plants of Ireland by botanist, Tom Curtis and lichenologist Paul Whelan, has a great, comprehensive guide on foraging for edible berries, perennial plants and wild flowering plants in Ireland.

I picked about a kilo worth of wild berries on a walk during the summer and made a delicious sweet yet robust syrup to add to various cocktails.

Above is a cocktail where I added this delicious wild berry syrup, one of my "From Garden to Glass cocktails! The method to making this wild berry syup is simple.

Method:

250gr Wild Berries

250gr Caster Sugar

5g Malic Acid

Instructions:

Vacuum Pack the mixture a cook Sous Vide for 20 minutes.