Something to note is that while the American Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) has traditionally been used to make jam, many ornamental Beautyberry shrubs might not be Callicarpa americana but rather species such as Callicarpa dichotoma, bodinieri or japonica. The edibility of those different ornamental species is less well documented. Especially here in Europe, Callicarpa americana is practically non-existent. We only grow the Asian species. Something to keep in mind before you chuck down a bunch of berries or process them into jam. ID the plant first.
@Cosmo Kramer they say the jam is very delicious, they pair it with other fruit for the jam and I guess the beautyberry in conjunction with other fruit has a really good taste.
If I were to correlate that fruit with something, it would be chives, because sometimes it has the same color and is also spicy.I don't know if I would ever try to make jam from these fruits🤔...
Oh ok. I remember as a kid being told these are poisonous and I remember a kid getting sick from eating them(nausea). Must have been another similar looking species. The leaves taste like peppermint or something, though, and you can eat those.
have you ever considered making a fruitsalad out of your favourite fruits? maybe 5-10 fruits of your all time top 50 would make a unique experience. ^^
More people should make fruit salad! I recently started making a big tupperware of fruit salad every few days. it's a great way to get more fruit in your diet.
I've been having a hard mother's Day (I lost my son 5 years ago and lost my mum 3 years ago so it's hard) this cheered me up Jared thank you. I needed this so much and you made me smile
I get it my father died March 9 three years ago my wife's mother's birthday was the 9 and she died on mother's day 18 years ago on her birthday/ mother's day. It's just crying all around for me mom's all upset, wife's all sad ,I'm dealing with my own sadness and still having to comfort them. Yeah!!!
I was very curious about the beauty berry, mostly about how edible it is. Glad to know they're just alright. I'll probably make some beauty berry lemonade, just to see how it is.
Banana bread, in Central Europe it is considered as lightly poisonous, especially for children or pets. It contains toxins which can case vomiting or nausea, but not life threatening.
@@henningbartels6245 Seriously? My lizard Cuddles ate some one time and he was fine, and he only weighed a little over a pound. He really liked bananas, so he grabbed a few crumbs of banana bread off a plate my dad left unsupervised because he could smell the banana in it I guess
and I love how the juice he made was basically lemonade with just a bit of the berry concentrate and he basically said "if it was more like lemonade I think it would taste even better"
Most of the knowledge we have about the edibility of plants comes from many generations of indigenous experimentation. I think what this channel is doing is beautiful and following in that same tradition. Maybe your beautyberry drink wasn't that great, but others can now experiment and share what they learn and eventually figure out some really cool recipes or ways to use this. A lot of the knowledge we have about how to eat common weed plants comes from the Great Depression when people were forced to rely on the plants around them instead of stuff they could purchase. Some of the fanciest foods today started out as "poverty dishes" that poor people ate out of desparation. Lobster and escargo are good examples of this
how about preserving them in sugar solution? if we can preserve the color and texture while adding sweetness this would make for an awsome dessert decoration
not poisonous, but if eaten raw they might upset your intestine, they are rich in tanine and that needs to be reduced. Just like any "edible" berry can give you an upset stomach
In Central Europe it is considered as lightly poisonous, especially for children or pets. It contains toxins which can case vomiting or nausea, but not life threatening.
Personally, I like the berries, eat em while on hikes after finding them, add them to water and let them soak, adds a hint of floral flavor to the water. The jam is awesome, and you can use it to make a wine.
I've gone and picked some in the wild, to me good ones taste sort of like Bottle Caps, they have an acidity that is reminiscent of some sodas. It depends on the plant and how ripe they are.
According to Green Deane (eattheweeds), this plant might be most useful as a mosquito repellent. Of course, as a Floridian, he might find that more important than food if it were merely 50% effective. Excessive blood loss due to insects is one way Floridians maintain their weights.
@@fivespeed3026 yea The fince rows are for horse and cows so the ones here are wild. I am lucky I have a lot of the wild foods. Looking at gathering mulberry next weekend and possibly some sassafras for tea and felo powder.
We've made beautyberry syrup before and it's great on pancakes, ice cream, and (believe it or not) fried chicken. The syrup and jam are made very sweet, so a little goes a long way. It has a very pleasant floral flavor.
Sorry for the offtopic comment, but I appreciate your demeanor a lot. Your videos calm me down and somehow make me less anxious about future and life in general
Cooked beauty berries aren't so beautiful I live in Seattle and got the opportunity to buy an extremely ugly atemoya for the first time a week or so ago. It was the last one on the shelf for $14 /lb New favorite
@@cactusmann5542 I actually loved the texture. Superior to both cherimoya and sugar Apple. If you put 100 atemoya for sale and 99 get sold only the ugliest one is left. That's the one I bought.
The fact that beauty berries have practically no flavor of personality and are only good when you really try to extract their essence is really familiar
@@lolcatz88 The Smarties you have are the same ones we have in the UK. Forrest Mars the son of the man who founded Mars was given Smarties by British soldiers during the Spanish civil war. After returning to the US, he "invented" M&Ms - one of the M's is Mars, the other is (Bruce) Murrie the son of the founder of Hershey's.
I was literally just wondering yesterday if you'd ever addressed these. I'm a Park Ranger in Arkansas and I get asked this question about Beauty Berry a lot. It's also called French or Russian Mulberry around South Arkansas.
I always forget that Americans call Rockets "Smarties" cause smarties in canada is candy coated chocolate. for a hot minute i thought you were drinking water flavoured with the candy off a box nestle smarties as a kid.
@@WeirdExplorer I could have sworn you guys had some other equivalent, but I may have been mistaken! My condolences on your lack of chocolate smarties!
Thank you for making this video. I recently discovered that we had beauty berry growing on our land and I’ve been interested in finding recipes to maybe preserve it so that it doesn’t go to waste.
You kinda look like if Tobuscus chose to go cool entertaining and interesting botanist route instead of turning into the awful weird creep he actually became, great vids!
These remind me a bit of porcelain berries. I don't think that porcelain berries are edible, but they might be the prettiest looking berries I've ever seen. They're bright turquoise blue, indigo, purple, and pink. They look like something straight out of a fairytale, like if you ate them you'd get magical powers. I saw them for the first time while living in Oregon. They were in my neighbor's yard and I just became completely fascinated by them.
I don’t know if you know this but what you call smarties are very different to what a British person would call smarties.... the British smarties sweet is a chocolate with a shell not unlike m&ms (but sweeter)
I was just going to comment about adjusting pH/acidity to adjust colour & voilé, you added lemon juice! But may be a thing to do when you do the initial boil of the berries though... Apparently leaves can be used for tea - Quite common to see allicarpa sp. in gardens of Japanese temples & shrines (so may have other uses too & Japanese varieties are even more striking to view).
Add some lemon and sugar and it will taste acceptable. Add more lemon and sugar and substittue a splash of red food color for Beauty berry to enjoy pink lemonade in half the time. Thanks for this fun look at my garden!
While living in Japan, I've come across many of these berries. I had no idea they were called beautyberries, and I didn't know they were edible too! I worked in schools as an English teacher and often found floral arrangements sometimes with these berries, and flower petals floating on water. They were very beautiful!
We have a Midnight Choke Cherry tree. As long as you don't eat the skin (or suck on the seed) it tastes like a cherry with no bad astringent quality. They're used for jellies or juice.
There are way too many people on Florida gardening forums who say they make beautyberry jam, but then mix it with other fruit to add flavor--usually strawberry. I'm not sure what the point is. The birds love them in the winter, and they look great on the plant! That's good enough for me.
Thanks for the video. I am glad you had a demo of how to make a drink with this berry. When I saw you crushing those sweets called smarties. I was surprised. In the UK Smarties are like your chocolate M&M. What your Smarties are known as are refreshers in the UK.
They remind me of the Rowan Berries we find in abundance during Scottish summertime - We would always be told they were poisonous, but we grow up to find out they're perfectly edible, just bitter and not very nice tasting - But, like these beauty berries, people do make jams and juices from them
I've had a bit of trouble germinating beautyberry seeds from the plants in my neighborhood, which makes sense since they're normally eaten by birds then pooped out. Of course my failed native plant attempts get tossed out into a corner of the yard and so far some of them now propagate a year later.
I thought they looked like cooked chokecherries when you were straining them, and then you said they tasted like them too. I should buy a lottery ticket.
Beautyberry jam rocks it's like a mixture of blueberries raspberries blackberries strawberries I can't really get my head around it... A nice deep purple color. The department of defense has studied beautyberry leaves because they are so effective in keeping mosquitoes away. Apparently old timers used to put the leaves in a burlap bag and hang it around the necks of horses and mules and such to keep the mosquitoes away. My girlfriend and I made a tincture by putting fresh beauty berry leaves in 100 proof vodka for 6 weeks shaking it once a day coffee filtering it at the end and putting it in a small spray bottle. Unfortunately we broke up and I could never saw the results. Beautyberry is definitely underappreciated.
When I was a kid, we thought these were poison and we called them snake berries. I think our parents told us they were snake berries because they thought they were poison and didn't want us to eat them.
After watching I decided to read more about them. Even if you don't like eating them, I guess you can use it as a natural insect repellent. Thanks as always for teaching us!
recently found your channel and really like it. i also like fruits and adventure. i've actually been yelled at by a gf in the past for eating wild berries without knowing for sure what they were at the time(wineberries, juneberries, beauty berries). to be fair, i recognized their familiarity to other things to feel pretty good about trying them safely.
Hey Man, so the Asian beauty berries terrible but the USA native beauty berries much better. In the park was an Asian type. Do you know if you used Asian or American type?
They tend to grow in the southern states. It's to the southern edge of the Ohio River Valley west of Appalachia & as far north as Maryland east of Appalachia. But, he said someone sent them to him. The ones in the park were probably Asian because growing the American ones north of their home region is said to be a bit of a pain-- the bush will die & come back again every year, & if you don't take care of it, it gets too choked with its own dead brush & eventually dies completely. So, you know... if that helps...
They look like the American type to me, but take it with a grain of salt. The American species has berry clusters that tightly wrap around the branch, while at least some of the Asian species have the berry clusters on small stems away from the branches.
the color changes when you add lemon because the pigment anthocyanin is sensitive to acidity, it is more blue/purple at basic pH and more red/pink at acidic pH
I made jam from wild beauty berries (I live in Florida). It's definitely an acquired taste. Really strong flavor, kind of reminds me of black currant but more sour(?) Not sure if that's the right word but it has something weird going on.
Have never seen anything like these before. They are indeed attractive, I can see why they would be used for landscaping. If they're edible, regardless of flavor, I would expect them to attract various animals [birds, rodents, deer?] which might prove unacceptable [I've seen what a flock of birds can do to ruin a car's finish in just an hour or two of exposure...]
what might be interesting to do is making some of this concentrate, diluting it just a bit with water and then freezing it in an icecube tray, and adding some bright pink-red ice cubes to your lemonade or other drinks
Thats wild! I always had beauty Berries growing in my yard but was always told never to eat them because they're VERY toxic like hemlock! I was told that since childhood so I never looked it up until now! Thanks! I bet they'd make a great syrup!
I was the 700th like awesome vid I love your channel I have stopped watching RUclips as I have got older but ur a channel I have hung on to and still watch all the time on my own time. Keep doing great educational videos.
Those beauty berries look like they are not quite ripe, it takes several weeks for them to get there and they last a surprisingly long time on the bush in the fall. I pick them when they are very dark purple, fatter, and softer (but not too squishy) and the interior is a little more yellow.
that smarties thing with the water reminds me of the time i put the sour skittles in hot water. lets just say that water was insanely sour and the skittles were colorless afterwards
I have a callicarpa - have handled them for others when I was still landscaping. Never knew the fruits were edible. Was awed by the fruits first time I saw them as an ornamental, though. It’s the kind of purple that looks almost like glass-beads, and not really plant tissue. (Youpon holly is like this, but red fruits.) Interesting to see you make food out of this.
These berries are SO pretty. I remember I found out about them and I went "Man, I wish these grew in my yard." Then later, I found beautyberries. In my yard. I immediately knew what they were and got super excited haha. Never eaten them though.
I used to own land with wild ones. I think they have to be very ripe before they’re palatable, almost bletted perhaps? Perhaps not even then? I’ve never tried any.
I've used these a bunch. They never really taste very good raw. They aren't offensive, but rather they really don't have much flavor. They are a bit astringent and will give you a stomach ache if you eat too many. When cooked, they provide a very interesting floral background that is very agreeable.
They are growing all around the perimeter of my yard, I think they're native here. People make jelly out of them a lot, and supposedly it's tasty. I haven't tried it. I want to buy a jar at a local farmer's market and try it before I go through the process of making it from my own berries. Pretty sure birds like to eat the berries, so they do have a use other than being decorative.
These look like video game "grapes" lol
Now you mentioned it, they look like the grapes from that NES game "King of Kings".
Taste the same too
@@ktennyson7108 lol
8 bits of flavor.
Not a texture berries
That bucket of berries was gorgeous
For real, I just kept staring at it...
Something to note is that while the American Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) has traditionally been used to make jam, many ornamental Beautyberry shrubs might not be Callicarpa americana but rather species such as Callicarpa dichotoma, bodinieri or japonica. The edibility of those different ornamental species is less well documented. Especially here in Europe, Callicarpa americana is practically non-existent. We only grow the Asian species. Something to keep in mind before you chuck down a bunch of berries or process them into jam. ID the plant first.
@Cosmo Kramer they say the jam is very delicious, they pair it with other fruit for the jam and I guess the beautyberry in conjunction with other fruit has a really good taste.
If I were to correlate that fruit with something, it would be chives, because sometimes it has the same color and is also spicy.I don't know if I would ever try to make jam from these fruits🤔...
Oh ok. I remember as a kid being told these are poisonous and I remember a kid getting sick from eating them(nausea). Must have been another similar looking species. The leaves taste like peppermint or something, though, and you can eat those.
@@exactly3053 Sounds like stone soup
These are Callicarpa americana, foraged from the wild in North Florida! That is interesting though.
have you ever considered making a fruitsalad out of your favourite fruits?
maybe 5-10 fruits of your all time top 50 would make a unique experience. ^^
Good idea!
More people should make fruit salad! I recently started making a big tupperware of fruit salad every few days. it's a great way to get more fruit in your diet.
Durian egg fruit mangosteen cherimoya and star apple? That sounds gross lol I guess the fruits I like are too different
@C Preacher fruit salad is quite good if you add fruit which complement eachother's flavors. otherwise yeah, fruit salads are kind of a shitshow
'Like in many cases it's beautiful but has no personality whatsoever' 🤣🤣🤣
👍😂😂😂😂
Glad I'm not the only one picking up on that comedy gold
You should know better than to spread this kind of pick up artist "philosophy"
@@jmcewans just because a despicable group professes something, doesn't make it untrue
@@Unsensitive The point is, it's at best a nonsense stereotype, at worst it helps maintain a typically sexist attitude
Man, the bacteria in your guts must be on edge, not knowing what they're going to get on a daily badass
😭😭😂😂😂😂
on a daily badass?
Badass???
Do you mean basis?
Daily badass?
I've been having a hard mother's Day (I lost my son 5 years ago and lost my mum 3 years ago so it's hard) this cheered me up Jared thank you. I needed this so much and you made me smile
Glad to hear it cheered you up a bit.
I get it my father died March 9 three years ago my wife's mother's birthday was the 9 and she died on mother's day 18 years ago on her birthday/ mother's day. It's just crying all around for me mom's all upset, wife's all sad ,I'm dealing with my own sadness and still having to comfort them. Yeah!!!
My mom has been gone 30 years now so here is my Happy Mother's Day for you.
My prayers are with you!
@@CoreyVonBloch thank you
I was very curious about the beauty berry, mostly about how edible it is. Glad to know they're just alright. I'll probably make some beauty berry lemonade, just to see how it is.
Yeah, not the best thing in the world, but would be fun to experiment with
Maybe nice added to strawberry lemonade? Or rose lemonade?
Freeze some in ice cubes.. wonder if they would stay purple...
Banana bread, in Central Europe it is considered as lightly poisonous, especially for children or pets. It contains toxins which can case vomiting or nausea, but not life threatening.
@@henningbartels6245 Seriously? My lizard Cuddles ate some one time and he was fine, and he only weighed a little over a pound. He really liked bananas, so he grabbed a few crumbs of banana bread off a plate my dad left unsupervised because he could smell the banana in it I guess
I feel like whenever something is not very good, people just make jam out of it.
no one has made jam out of me yet
and I love how the juice he made was basically lemonade with just a bit of the berry concentrate and he basically said "if it was more like lemonade I think it would taste even better"
@@chairwood yet
I never had jammed rabbit
@@The.Queen.Cat. then you’ve never really lived.
Most of the knowledge we have about the edibility of plants comes from many generations of indigenous experimentation. I think what this channel is doing is beautiful and following in that same tradition. Maybe your beautyberry drink wasn't that great, but others can now experiment and share what they learn and eventually figure out some really cool recipes or ways to use this.
A lot of the knowledge we have about how to eat common weed plants comes from the Great Depression when people were forced to rely on the plants around them instead of stuff they could purchase. Some of the fanciest foods today started out as "poverty dishes" that poor people ate out of desparation. Lobster and escargo are good examples of this
True!
how about preserving them in sugar solution? if we can preserve the color and texture while adding sweetness this would make for an awsome dessert decoration
I have these bushes in my backyard. I've seriously been waiting for a video like this!🙏
It looks really good.
What is the most ""Purple" tasting fruit you have had?
grapple maybe? ruclips.net/video/qABclXwEIR0/видео.html
wild florida muscadines
Oh wow, I just figured those were poisonous, so I never messed with them.
not poisonous, but if eaten raw they might upset your intestine, they are rich in tanine and that needs to be reduced. Just like any "edible" berry can give you an upset stomach
In Central Europe it is considered as lightly poisonous, especially for children or pets. It contains toxins which can case vomiting or nausea, but not life threatening.
Red ones that look similar are. Gotta be those purplish ones.
It's always good to err on the side of caution
@@TheSakeCat I knew the red ones were definitely poisonous. Figured if those are poisonous, these bright purple ones must be very poisonous haha
Personally, I like the berries, eat em while on hikes after finding them, add them to water and let them soak, adds a hint of floral flavor to the water. The jam is awesome, and you can use it to make a wine.
I've gone and picked some in the wild, to me good ones taste sort of like Bottle Caps, they have an acidity that is reminiscent of some sodas. It depends on the plant and how ripe they are.
I frikken love bottlecaps! So delicious, especially the rootbeer ones. And I hear they're gonna become a currency in the far future!
If you have callicarpa that taste like bottle caps send me some 🤣 cuz that shiz is bland as hell and very floral
this is a good point, you can try something, think you dont like it, and try one in ideal conditions tree ripened and be surprised
According to Green Deane (eattheweeds), this plant might be most useful as a mosquito repellent. Of course, as a Floridian, he might find that more important than food if it were merely 50% effective. Excessive blood loss due to insects is one way Floridians maintain their weights.
Floridian. Can confirm.
100% correct and it works amazing.
www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2007/old-time-mosquito-remedy-may-work-against-ticks-too/
considering how the leaves smell when you tear them, i can see why.
This is correct. All of it. I'm also a big fan of Green Dean. He's a champion and Florida's proud of him.
4:08 a teaspoon of sugar?? HA, you wish! That was a tablespoon at the lowest.
@dingo23451: It actually scans:
_Just a tablespoon of sugar helps the beautyberry go down_
_The beautyberry go down, beautyberry go down_
etc., etc.
I would love a liquid eyeliner that colour. Thank you for the great video.
I wonder if you could make a dye out of these.. hm.
@@WeirdExplorer god yes you can....ive got plenty of stained clothes to prove it.
We grow them in Florida.. wild too... yes Jam
Yes they're everywhere down here. They grow in all my fince rows.
Yeah they even grow wild in Florida. I’ve found them growing in the woods.
@@fivespeed3026 yea
The fince rows are for horse and cows so the ones here are wild. I am lucky I have a lot of the wild foods.
Looking at gathering mulberry next weekend and possibly some sassafras for tea and felo powder.
@@fivespeed3026 they are east to root by the stems
I’ve got one a bird grew for me, lol
How about a beautyberry sauce to go with some gator nuggets? Or fries. Beautyberry ketchup anybody?
Yes! Yes! A Beautyberry "Will it ketchup?" episode, for sure! 🤣
We've made beautyberry syrup before and it's great on pancakes, ice cream, and (believe it or not) fried chicken. The syrup and jam are made very sweet, so a little goes a long way. It has a very pleasant floral flavor.
Sorry for the offtopic comment, but I appreciate your demeanor a lot. Your videos calm me down and somehow make me less anxious about future and life in general
Cooked beauty berries aren't so beautiful
I live in Seattle and got the opportunity to buy an extremely ugly atemoya for the first time a week or so ago. It was the last one on the shelf for $14 /lb
New favorite
Ugly-yes. Bad texture with large seeds-also yes. Dope taste -YES!
@@cactusmann5542 I actually loved the texture. Superior to both cherimoya and sugar Apple. If you put 100 atemoya for sale and 99 get sold only the ugliest one is left. That's the one I bought.
The fact that beauty berries have practically no flavor of personality and are only good when you really try to extract their essence is really familiar
"Smarty soup" just seems so confusing for other parts of the world where smarties are more like m&m's...but even lower quality
I like how Rockets and Smarties change names depending on where you are.
Smarties in Australia are candy coated chocolate... like plain m&ms
@@lolcatz88 The Smarties you have are the same ones we have in the UK.
Forrest Mars the son of the man who founded Mars was given Smarties by British soldiers during the Spanish civil war.
After returning to the US, he "invented" M&Ms - one of the M's is Mars, the other is (Bruce) Murrie the son of the founder of Hershey's.
@@lolcatz88 same here in Canada!
@@_Piers_ very interesting factoid! Thank you friend!
Same in South Africa - Smarties are like M&Ms but flatter.
I've heard you can make wine from them, but I haven't tried it yet
I’m OBSESSED with the American beauty berry as a landscape plant.
They are, well, beautiful.
They look so pretty in the Tupperware I CANT HANDLE IT
I was literally just wondering yesterday if you'd ever addressed these. I'm a Park Ranger in Arkansas and I get asked this question about Beauty Berry a lot. It's also called French or Russian Mulberry around South Arkansas.
Florida native, birds ❤️ em
They look like a really beautiful and organic way to decorate cakes.
Good idea!
We have beauty berries where I live! Very interesting video so far!
I always forget that Americans call Rockets "Smarties" cause smarties in canada is candy coated chocolate. for a hot minute i thought you were drinking water flavoured with the candy off a box nestle smarties as a kid.
Canadian smarties are much better than US Smarties. Closest we have are M&Ms...
@@WeirdExplorer I could have sworn you guys had some other equivalent, but I may have been mistaken! My condolences on your lack of chocolate smarties!
Jots?
Thank you for making this video. I recently discovered that we had beauty berry growing on our land and I’ve been interested in finding recipes to maybe preserve it so that it doesn’t go to waste.
Glad it was helpful
Beautyberry as a pH tester?
You kinda look like if Tobuscus chose to go cool entertaining and interesting botanist route instead of turning into the awful weird creep he actually became, great vids!
I knew you would be able to do something interesting with these. I have heard they are used as lipstick which is where the name comes from.
Not only is it absolutely stunning but it can be made into a decent .... juice .... color me impressed!
I'm getting old.... I'm mildly jealous at the size of his sink. Looks like hes got room!
These remind me a bit of porcelain berries. I don't think that porcelain berries are edible, but they might be the prettiest looking berries I've ever seen. They're bright turquoise blue, indigo, purple, and pink. They look like something straight out of a fairytale, like if you ate them you'd get magical powers. I saw them for the first time while living in Oregon. They were in my neighbor's yard and I just became completely fascinated by them.
I don’t know if you know this but what you call smarties are very different to what a British person would call smarties.... the British smarties sweet is a chocolate with a shell not unlike m&ms (but sweeter)
Yes, these are known as "Rockets" in the UK and Canada.
The acid changing the pink orange was great!
That juice might be good in a cocktail.
I was just going to comment about adjusting pH/acidity to adjust colour & voilé, you added lemon juice! But may be a thing to do when you do the initial boil of the berries though... Apparently leaves can be used for tea - Quite common to see allicarpa sp. in gardens of Japanese temples & shrines (so may have other uses too & Japanese varieties are even more striking to view).
When you tried describing the flavor I started thinking of La Croix
These grew on my college campus. didnt even know they were edible. thought it was just an ornamental
Add some lemon and sugar and it will taste acceptable. Add more lemon and sugar and substittue a splash of red food color for Beauty berry to enjoy pink lemonade in half the time. Thanks for this fun look at my garden!
The color really looks beautiful .. nature is amazing
While living in Japan, I've come across many of these berries. I had no idea they were called beautyberries, and I didn't know they were edible too! I worked in schools as an English teacher and often found floral arrangements sometimes with these berries, and flower petals floating on water. They were very beautiful!
Describing this sounds like an indictment of my love life. 😂😂
When Jared mentions peppers:
Ah... he forgot what it’s like to eat nothing but hot peppers for weeks on end.... 😂
Also: will it ketchup?
Will it ketchup is so last Tuesady. Will it hollandaise is the new hotness.
But seriously, I would still also like to know if it'll ketchup.
lets talk about that
I’ve wondered if these were any good! They’re definitely beautiful in person, very intense color
We have a Midnight Choke Cherry tree. As long as you don't eat the skin (or suck on the seed) it tastes like a cherry with no bad astringent quality. They're used for jellies or juice.
There are way too many people on Florida gardening forums who say they make beautyberry jam, but then mix it with other fruit to add flavor--usually strawberry. I'm not sure what the point is. The birds love them in the winter, and they look great on the plant! That's good enough for me.
really enjoy your descriptions & knowledge.
😊
I have a huge bush in my backyard, and I always thought they were poisonous!! Omg I have to make beautyberry jam once it grows again
Thanks for the video. I am glad you had a demo of how to make a drink with this berry. When I saw you crushing those sweets called smarties. I was surprised. In the UK Smarties are like your chocolate M&M. What your Smarties are known as are refreshers in the UK.
They remind me of the Rowan Berries we find in abundance during Scottish summertime - We would always be told they were poisonous, but we grow up to find out they're perfectly edible, just bitter and not very nice tasting - But, like these beauty berries, people do make jams and juices from them
I've had a bit of trouble germinating beautyberry seeds from the plants in my neighborhood, which makes sense since they're normally eaten by birds then pooped out. Of course my failed native plant attempts get tossed out into a corner of the yard and so far some of them now propagate a year later.
I blend them up with some water to get the juice. Then i add that to my lemonade! So good! 😋😋😋
Great idea!!
I thought they looked like cooked chokecherries when you were straining them, and then you said they tasted like them too. I should buy a lottery ticket.
Beautyberry jam rocks it's like a mixture of blueberries raspberries blackberries strawberries I can't really get my head around it... A nice deep purple color.
The department of defense has studied beautyberry leaves because they are so effective in keeping mosquitoes away. Apparently old timers used to put the leaves in a burlap bag and hang it around the necks of horses and mules and such to keep the mosquitoes away. My girlfriend and I made a tincture by putting fresh beauty berry leaves in 100 proof vodka for 6 weeks shaking it once a day coffee filtering it at the end and putting it in a small spray bottle.
Unfortunately we broke up and I could never saw the results. Beautyberry is definitely underappreciated.
I had read that some in the American South make a jelly with them. Thanks for investigating!
When I was a kid, we thought these were poison and we called them snake berries. I think our parents told us they were snake berries because they thought they were poison and didn't want us to eat them.
After watching I decided to read more about them. Even if you don't like eating them, I guess you can use it as a natural insect repellent. Thanks as always for teaching us!
I tried a beauty berry jam at the local farmers market, it was so good! Surprisingly, there wasn’t much sugar in it.
recently found your channel and really like it. i also like fruits and adventure. i've actually been yelled at by a gf in the past for eating wild berries without knowing for sure what they were at the time(wineberries, juneberries, beauty berries). to be fair, i recognized their familiarity to other things to feel pretty good about trying them safely.
I hope your channel blows up one day, all these videos are so interesting
These grow wild in my area and i’ve always heard about making jam from them but never tried it, love seeing you talk about them
Hey Man, so the Asian beauty berries terrible but the USA native beauty berries much better. In the park was an Asian type. Do you know if you used Asian or American type?
Hey Steven! I don't know! they were bigger berries than the one in the park, otherwise I didnt notice any major difference.
They tend to grow in the southern states. It's to the southern edge of the Ohio River Valley west of Appalachia & as far north as Maryland east of Appalachia. But, he said someone sent them to him.
The ones in the park were probably Asian because growing the American ones north of their home region is said to be a bit of a pain-- the bush will die & come back again every year, & if you don't take care of it, it gets too choked with its own dead brush & eventually dies completely. So, you know... if that helps...
They look like the American type to me, but take it with a grain of salt.
The American species has berry clusters that tightly wrap around the branch, while at least some of the Asian species have the berry clusters on small stems away from the branches.
pickle jelly!! that color is too beautiful to loose!
Finally i know what *i miss "the random foraging Vlogs* before going in on tasting" the fruit
the color changes when you add lemon because the pigment anthocyanin is sensitive to acidity, it is more blue/purple at basic pH and more red/pink at acidic pH
I made jam from wild beauty berries (I live in Florida). It's definitely an acquired taste. Really strong flavor, kind of reminds me of black currant but more sour(?) Not sure if that's the right word but it has something weird going on.
A friend of mine foraged some beauty berries and made a pie with them (and blueberries), it was pretty good.
Have never seen anything like these before. They are indeed attractive, I can see why they would be used for landscaping. If they're edible, regardless of flavor, I would expect them to attract various animals [birds, rodents, deer?] which might prove unacceptable [I've seen what a flock of birds can do to ruin a car's finish in just an hour or two of exposure...]
The color of the drink is pretty. I could see people making cocktails using this just for the color.
what might be interesting to do is making some of this concentrate, diluting it just a bit with water and then freezing it in an icecube tray, and adding some bright pink-red ice cubes to your lemonade or other drinks
Great video like always hugs from Portugal.
Thats wild! I always had beauty Berries growing in my yard but was always told never to eat them because they're VERY toxic like hemlock! I was told that since childhood so I never looked it up until now! Thanks! I bet they'd make a great syrup!
me too. one growing in the corner of my yard. do yours smell weird too?
@@frigglebiscuit7484 Honestly I haven't even touched them because my mom treated the bushes like they were snakes. lol
I'm not sold! The best use for it is to make your garden look beautiful!
Gorgeous looking fruit.
So it sounds like these don't make a good main flavor, but a good complementary flavor. Interesting. I might try out making some beautyberry lemonade.
My Spanish textbook was this color as well as a pair of Converse I used to have 😩
I was the 700th like awesome vid I love your channel I have stopped watching RUclips as I have got older but ur a channel I have hung on to and still watch all the time on my own time. Keep doing great educational videos.
Those beauty berries look like they are not quite ripe, it takes several weeks for them to get there and they last a surprisingly long time on the bush in the fall. I pick them when they are very dark purple, fatter, and softer (but not too squishy) and the interior is a little more yellow.
I’ve always sent these growing in my grandma’s backyard when I was a kid and people always told me they were poisonous
Thank you so much for this video!!
that smarties thing with the water reminds me of the time i put the sour skittles in hot water. lets just say that water was insanely sour and the skittles were colorless afterwards
I have a callicarpa - have handled them for others when I was still landscaping. Never knew the fruits were edible. Was awed by the fruits first time I saw them as an ornamental, though. It’s the kind of purple that looks almost like glass-beads, and not really plant tissue. (Youpon holly is like this, but red fruits.) Interesting to see you make food out of this.
they seem like they'd do amazing as like a garnish
These berries are SO pretty. I remember I found out about them and I went "Man, I wish these grew in my yard."
Then later, I found beautyberries. In my yard. I immediately knew what they were and got super excited haha. Never eaten them though.
Callicarpa always pose a fun challenge for identification in Hong Kong.
I have these in my yard, but I never knew you could eat them. The birds will strip the Viburnums, but ignore the Beaytyberries.
Chokecherrys are really popular on Saskatchewan Canada as well.
I used to own land with wild ones. I think they have to be very ripe before they’re palatable, almost bletted perhaps? Perhaps not even then? I’ve never tried any.
I've used these a bunch. They never really taste very good raw. They aren't offensive, but rather they really don't have much flavor. They are a bit astringent and will give you a stomach ache if you eat too many. When cooked, they provide a very interesting floral background that is very agreeable.
I think you are such a nice person! Best person to invite people to meet new fruits!
These would be interesting to make a simple syrup out of
It has such a pretty color.
maybe i need to get out but you just have a vibe I wanna hug
They are growing all around the perimeter of my yard, I think they're native here. People make jelly out of them a lot, and supposedly it's tasty. I haven't tried it. I want to buy a jar at a local farmer's market and try it before I go through the process of making it from my own berries. Pretty sure birds like to eat the berries, so they do have a use other than being decorative.