The Bottomland

Have you ever heard of a beauty berry? I hadn’t either. One season, I hung a tree stand on my hunting property and didn’t think anything about it. It was in a pine bottom thicket that’s super dense, thick, and humid. I felt it was a good place for deer and pigs to live. And I have been right on that assumption. Yeeyee!

One surprise was the number of small purple berries that popped up all around my tree stand. I had no idea what they were, but every bush was covered in them. I’m not one to eat a foreign berry I’ve never seen before, but I wanted to take advantage of the surplus I had found. So I went and did some googling.

I had stumbled on the American beauty berry. It is a native shrub to the southeast, Cuba, and Bermuda. So hot and humid grows the berry. Got it. I felt lucky that I had stumbled upon such a surplus of such a uniquely southern berry.

It’s part of the mint family and is also called the American mulberry. I think beauty berry sounds better. And for the linguistic officials: Beauty Berry. From the Latin, Callicarpa Americana. “Callicarpa” means beautiful fruit. Which is fitting because the small purple berries are what caught my eye from the tree stand.

Learn Something

So now equipped with my “won’t die” knowledge, I took my berry jug and got to picking. I pick blackberries every summer, and I have not found a better picking container than a 1-gallon milk jug. The berries grew in beautiful purple clusters and were incredibly easy to pick. No thorns! That was soooo nice. I just ran my fingers through the clusters, collected what easily fell off, and left some for the birds and deer. They were also firm enough that they didn’t mush in my fingers while picking. Within a couple of hours, I had filled my bucket, which was impressive because the berry is only about the size of a copper BB.

I also learned that the leaves of the beauty berry shrub are a natural mosquito repellent. You can harvest the leaves for a repellent spray, so add another project to my list. Or you can just crumple the leaves and rub them on your skin, in a pinch. I have not tried this, so I cannot vouch on its validity, but it’s good to know if you ever forget your Thermacell in the tree stand. Test first, then try.

Flavor

So now I had a mess of these tiny lavender berries. Now what? They are edible, but The Flavor?….it’s something. It taste like a Chinese five-spice in a berry. I don’t know what to tell you, if you’ve never tried Chinese five-spice, though. A spicy, lavender BB.

If I were lost in the woods for days, starving, and found these, they would be a God-send. But I don’t have to worry about these berries getting eaten before they make it to the bucket, like blackberries.

Since these berries are uniquely special to the southeast, I discovered the recipe bank wasn’t as deep as other jelly recipes. The majority of recipe suggestions I found came from Florida, and the majority of those suggested making jelly. Actually, everything I found said to make jelly. Makes sense after eating a few. It could possibly make for an interesting wine, but that’s for another post.

So, I washed, dried, bagged, and froze all my berries. I find freezing berries before making any jelly creates more juice. Freezing shreds the cell walls of the berry and renders more juice. Plus, my food mill doesn’t have to work as hard. Science.

I dumped all my berries into a big pot and added enough water to jump-start the juice flow. I brought everything to a boil and cooked the berries until they turned soft and pale. I let them cool slightly, then ran everything through my food mill.

If you do any type of canning or food preservation, I highly recommend getting a food mill. I have this one. It’s heavy duty and beast to clean at the end, but I wouldn’t make jelly any other way. It removes all seeds, skins, and stems from everything. It’s proven its worth in my kitchen ten times over.

I ended up with 2 gallons of juice. Now here’s where I “messed up.” The juice was put in my fridge, got pushed to the back, and forgotten about for several months. Several. Months. It sat there long enough for the sediment to settle to the bottom of my jars. For your safety, I don’t recommend you do that. But… here’s what I DID notice.

Juice

The separation of the sediment and liquid gave me some very, very clear juice. I don’t believe I could’ve gotten the juice that clear if I’d run it through 100 filters. There was also no mold or rancid smell. Even after the long sit.

I don’t have any type of taste-gauge on what this jelly should taste like, so I don’t know if forgetting about it for that long changed the flavor. I do know that the taste shot I tried was slightly sweeter than the original berry I remembered eating. It now had an earthy cranberry-type taste. I’m guessing either the sediment settled with the majority of the bitter elements or the flavor just peaked and was leveling out. Either way, I was pleased it had some sweet notes before I even added the sugar.

I siphoned off the clear juice and ended up 12 cups. I originally thought to do a 1:1 ratio of sugar to juice. 12 cups of juice. 12 cups of sugar. But after my taste test, I decided to scale that back to 1/2 cup of sugar per 1 cup of juice. I use a pectin powder from Amazon when I make my jellies. Mainly because it allows me to limit the sugar and still get the setup. It works marvelously.

My pectin powder comes with instructions, and this is the recipe formula I go by when making unique jellies. This was definitely unique, so this is the formula I used.

MY Formula

12 cups of juice

6 cups of sugar

12 tsp of pectin powder

12 tsp of calcium water

12 tbsp of lemon juice

1/4 stick of butter to limit foaming

Boil It

I brought the juice to a rolling boil.

I mixed the pectin powder in with the sugar prior to adding it to the boiling liquid. I found it cuts down on clumping. Pectin powder doesn’t mix really well when dumped straight into the boiling juice. In goes the sugar pectin mixture and cook it for 10 minutes.

Gel Test

Before I start any jelly process, I place a plate in my freezer for the gel test. Once the jelly was starting to thicken up, I placed a spoonful of liquid on the frozen plate. If it runs off the plate, it’s too runny. This set up nicely, and I was very pleased. I’ve never tried this type of jelly before, so I didn’t know how beauty berry juice would gel up.

I found an unopened case of jelly jars from seasons past in my basement. Point for hoarder. I cleaned and sanitized my jars, then ladled my juice into each jar. I filled all my jars up to the bottom rung of the collar. I had more juice than I anticipated and blew through the entire case of jelly jars. So I found a couple of pint jars in my cabinet and filled them as well. Everything then was lidded and ringed. All the jars went into a rolling boil water bath for 20 minutes. Allow to cool and wait for the satisfying pings.

Final Result

The jelly has an interesting sweet flavor and works well on a biscuit. But what doesn’t?

If you are lucky enough to come across these little berries, I recommend grabbing them and making this jelly. I found it very rewarding and another recipe to add to my garden of eatin experiments! What’s a unique jelly you have tried in the past?