What to do with Black Currant Fruit Video

Felix from Gurney's Seed and Nursery talks of cleaning, storing and of the different ways you can use your black currant produce. Learn of the fruit's nutritional value and culinary properties, and of some surprising black currant recipes.

Hi everyone, Felix here at Gurney's and today I want to talk to you about black currants and some pointers about what to do with them and also why I think they're really a great crop for a homeowner. You can see it's mid-June here and we have a really nice crop of black currants coming on, they're ripening right now, they're ready to pick, and it's really easy picking, there are no thorns to deal with, you just lift the branch up and you can just take your hand and just rake them right into your hand like this. It doesn't matter that there are a few stems there, you put that into a basket and then, when you wash them, you put them in a bowl of water and all the stems will rise off to the top and you just let them run over the top of your pot, and these will stay at the bottom. It's very easy to clean them and then you can cook with them. You can freeze them straight away. You can freeze them before you wash them, so they don't stick together and use them later in the winter, but they're absolutely wonderful to cook with, and what I want you folks to do is to look for some of my recipes on the blog. I have one that is exceptional for black currant. It has a little secret recipe, little secret ingredient in there and this stuff tastes like chocolate. There's no chocolate in it, but it tastes like chocolate sorbet. It has some black currant flavor. It's absolutely wonderful and the other thing about black currants is that they have full of antioxidants. You look inside here and they have that really dark pigment of skin, which is where all those anthocyanins hang out. So there's a lot of health benefits in the black currants. They're one of the top-ranking fruit types for anthocyanins, an antioxidant. The other thing that's really unique about black currants is that they will produce fruit in full shade. Black currants will do that and they're very few fruiting crops to do that so you can grow these on the north side of your house. In fact, I have a couple of black currants on the north side of my garage and every year, a really nice crop, which is a wonderful place to use them in the landscape. I hope you all will look for some of the other recipes, so sorbet, I mentioned and some others that we have for meat sauces on the blog and I hope you'll give them a try. They're a wonderful fruiting crop for the backyard.