Beautyberries: Expect the Unexpected

The American Beautyberry is a Florida native plant.  It can grow into a large shrub that is often used in Florida friendly landscapes because it’s a good source of food for birds and other wildlife.

Early in September I noticed that the beautyberries (Callicarpa americana) had started to ripen.  At one time I had read that they were inedible but recently I found out that they make an excellent jelly.  I really wanted to try some of the jelly.

I dug up a good beautyberry jelly recipe and went out to gather a quart and a half of the berries.  My investigation had revealed that you can eat a few berries in the raw state and they won’t hurt you.  After trying a few raw beautyberries I quickly discovered that you wouldn’t want to eat a lot of them unless you were starving.  They are extremely mealy and taste like how I imagine Pine-Sol would taste.

My wife and I are not experienced preserve or jelly makers.  We carefully followed the steps in the recipe to make an infusion from the fruit.  We added the requisite amount of sugar, an entire package of Sure-Jell and some lemon juice.  By this time the infusion was starting to smell tantalizing.

We waited for our jelly to set.  Then we waited some more.  It never set.

After all this work I wanted to at least taste some.  It turned out that we had a truly delectable syrup. While we didn’t have any jelly to show for our efforts, we had several mason jars full of delicious syrup that we’ve been putting on top of pancakes, crepes and vanilla yogurt.  We even made a vinaigrette from the syrup for one of our salads.

I have to admit that the beautyberry syrup is not a health food because it has a lot of sugar.  But it can easily rival the most delicious raspberry syrup for flavor.

Just click here for the process of making the jelly, where another blogger, Danielle, from Brevard County has already documented all the steps.