| Picking tundra salmon berries from a nice patch a few miles from Tuntutuliak, AK. These berries are a reddish orange color and a little hard when they are first ready to pick in mid July. Most people pick them while they are still hard and then let them ripen and soften in the bucket. The drawback of this is that the sepals must be individually picked by hand off of every berry. If you just pick the ones that are already getting soft on the plant (wait a little longer before picking) then the berries come right out leaving the sepals and a lot of extra work behind. Why doesn't everyone wait then? Well, tundra berries are first come first serve and it is much less messy to pick them early when they don't squish so easy. |
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The berry in this picture is a little on the overripe side. They are about the color of fresh salmon meat when they just get ripe and then the color slowly fades as the berry becomes softer and softer. It would take care to pick this berry without squishing it into juice and seeds.
Also, notice the plant around the salmonberry leaves that has little pointy leaves like short pine needles. That plant is called tundra tea or labordor tea and is popular all over western AK. Just throw a handful in some water and boil. I am not a tea expert, but to me it tastes OK, better on a cold day. |
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| There may be a lot of Berries on the tundra, but there are also a lot of mosquitos! Notice the mosquito net hats. We picked about two gallons on this particular trip and I squeezed and strained all the juice I could get from them and used it to make jelly. Because of the large seeds I do not really care for salmon berry jam/preserves. They are good just to eat right out of the berry bucket though. They do have their very own and different flavor from any other kind of berry that I have every tried. |
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| These are locally called tundra cranberries. They are a little pulpy and don't have much flavor in my opinion. I think they are best eaten as a mixture with other berries, especially in aguduk. Aguduk is not the correct spelling, but if you sound it out it will sound right. It is kind of like crisco frosting with lots of berries in it -- also called, "Eskimo Icecream". It is a modified version of the more traditional food that I beleive was mainly seal oil and berries without the sugar that I imagine was similar to the pemmican (spelling again) made of lard and berries that used to be a favorite of the old time trappers in the American West. |
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| These are refered to as black berries on the tundra of Western Alaska. Notice the small pointy leaves of the plant similar to the pine needle shape of the tundra tea, but much smaller and denser. There is another black colored berry on the tundra that is larger and the plant has large flat oval leaves. That one is not popular to eat, but this one, pictured, is very popular. Every bite gives you a burst of slightly sweet, non-tart, semi-flavorless and refreshing berry juice. The seeds are tiny and hardly noticable. The best way to get these is with a berry picker and to preserve them you just fill up a bag and keep them in the freezer. Eat frozen or thawed alone or mixed with other berries all winter long if you picked enough. |
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| My personal favorite is the tundra blueberry. If you could concentrate pure blueberry flavor without the sweetness into a mouth-puckering pushpin-sized berry then you would have something like these berries. They grow in often thick patches on the edges of the tundra on western or northern slopes mostly and are pretty easy to pick. They make the most excellent blueberry jelly (be sure to use plenty of pectin or you will have a large supply of blueberry syrup -- still good). They are good mixed with the blackberries and cranberries mentioned above if you feel like just having a bowl of berries. |
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| I changed my mind, this is my favorite tundra berry, the rasberry. They grow so few and far between on the tundra that I have never picked enough for a bowl full. I spent a summer in Fairbanks once and was surprised to find that these delicious and sweet berries grow all over in the interior of Alaska. We picked a gallon of them from berry bushes along the road and around the fairgrounds in Fairbanks and found even better patches near streams and rivers along the highway between Fairbanks and Tok. Supper berries. I wonder how they would taste mixed with those sour blueberries, uhm... |
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| I don't know much about these berries, but a translation from Yup'ik to English would be something like crunchyberry. I didn't know they were good to eat until recently. I was told that they are kind of crunchy, a little pulpy, with a mild flavor. Maybe you could find some and let me know how they are. |
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