Time for Summer Pudding?

Summer berries (especially Jan’s favourite raspberries) are one of the delights of our summer holidays. This year, due to (maybe) correct pruning and good rain or just beating the birds and bugs to the fruit, we’ve had a great crop of Youngberries in our back garden. Berries picked warm from the sun taste pretty good but we’ve been disciplined enough to collect a bowl like the one above, every second day. Youngberries are more popular in Australia than in the US where Mr Young from Louisiana bred a cross between a raspberry, a blackberry, and the clincher apparently, a dew berry. They smell like raspberries, are more solid and store well in the fridge. There’s very little information I could find online other than this sparse Wikipedia entry and some nursery fact sheets which seem to differ. I’ve had Loganberries planted before, but I like these best.

So eating them is of more our current interest and a handful of them on my morning muesli and yogurt seemed certain to see them last for days. Until Jan suggested making a summer pudding to take to Elizabeth and Michael Croft’s for New Year’s Eve. Because you cook them down a bit with sugar, that took care of about a kilo and a half of youngberries and our regular Christmas crop of red currants.

The full recipe (it’s very simple) is here in our Kitchen recipe section, and I’ve made a short video to show the process (and then of eating it with friends at Mountain Creek Farm, while the fireworks in Canberra spluttered way off on the horizon). The Croft’s Maremma dogs didn’t like the fireworks, and you can hear them barking in the video. We ate the pudding with whipped cream, and Michael brought out a selection of ice cream, and the vanilla varieties went well too. The white bread makes it more a ‘pudding’ like with bread and butter pudding. We could have added a bit more of the juice that you strain off, but we left it at home.

It didn’t last long enough to matter much. If you’ve got some spare berries, it’s a recommended summer treat.

A good crop of Youngberries from our garden prompted Jan to make a summer pudding for New Year’s Eve. And me to make a video.