When you have a large crop of blackberries from the garden or farmstand, you don't have time to casually include them in complicated recipes or to frantically figure out how to use them up before they go bad without getting sick of them. You want to make the most of your harvest and to actually enjoy it.
Most of the uses below refer to the berries (as opposed to the leaves and flowers) unless otherwise indicated.
Here at Plant to Plate, we like to keep things simple! Here are some of my favorite ways to use or preserve blackberries:
- Add them to baked goods, alone or with any of the following: lavender, lemon balm, lemon verbena, peppermint.
- Top toast, crostini, crackers, or bagels with blackberries and any of the following:
- Cottage cheese and cinnamon
- Cream cheese and peppermint
- Goat cheese and lemon balm
- Toss them with strawberries and blueberries.
- Use them as Walls in an Interesting Salad. (Wondering why I capitalized those letters? Read more about Interesting Salads here!)
- Make a Simple Salad with blackberries, lettuce, and goat cheese.
- Add them to other salads.
- Add them to smoothies, alone or with bananas and/or cherries.
- Make infused water with them, along with any combination of the following: lavender, catmint, spearmint, peppermint, lemon slices, lemon balm, lemon verbena.
- Make infused vinegar. Blackberry fruits, leaves, and flowers can all be infused in vinegar, together or separately, as they are or with lemony herbs such as lemon verbena, lemon balm, or lemon thyme. Infused vinegar can be used as a salad dressing or dressing base, among other uses.
- Make a tea. Blackberry leaves and flowers are best suited for an infusion. Blackberry fruits (berries), fresh or dried, can be added to both infusions and decoctions. Learn more about herbal preparations like these in this article.
- Make a tincture with the leaves. An herb:solvent weight ratio of 1:4 at 40% alcohol is suggested for a blackberry leaf tincture.
- Freeze them to save them for later. See our article on freezing produce here for more information.
- Dry the leaves and flowers for later use. See our How to Dry Your Herbs articles here for more information.
- Dry or dehydrate the berries as another preservation technique. See our Drying and Dehydrating article here for further info.
Further Reading
Growing blackberries? Check out these quick facts like their best growing conditions, companion plants, and expected yields.
Blackberries are also featured in these articles: