Diners enjoy the fruits of chefs' labors: demand for summer berries ripens as sweet garnish for entrees and desserts

Nation's Restaurant News,  May 27, 2002  by Pamela Parseghian

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In "Romeo and Juliet" Shakespeare wrote, "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

For many people the same sentiment holds true for some relatives of the rose -- raspberries, blackberries and strawberries. Summer berries, regardless of their name, can seduce with their sweet smell and flavor.

Pastry chef Guy Powell of the Performing Arts Center in Newark, N.J., notes the family resemblance between roses and strawberries. "You can take a long-stem strawberry and sit it down by itself. It is just as elegant as a beautiful flower. I don't get that with an apple."

Horticulturist Tom Sjulin of Driscoll Strawberry Associates in Watsonville, Calif., points out that the very large rose family, Rosaceae, actually includes apples, peaches, plums, nectarines and quince. Furthermore, he explains, many summer berries are not individual fruits. They are actually a "clump of individual fruits.

"With raspberries and blackberries you have this sack of individual fruits." Each raspberry fruit, or drupelet, is a complete fruit, and each berry has between 80 and 100 drupelets.

Depending on the size, a strawberry is made up of 100 to 150 individual fruits, and every seed on the exterior of a strawberry accounts for one fruit. The part we eat includes the tissue that supports those individual fruits, according to Sjulin.

So it is no wonder that fine-dining chefs include these jewels of a fruit in some of their most elegant offerings.

Sam DeMarco, chef-partner of District and First restaurants in New York, accompanies French toast and foie gras terrine, $20, with poached rhubarb and strawberries tossed with mint, black pepper and balsamic vinegar. He says he based the strawberry mixture on a classic Italian combination of balsamic vinegar, black pepper and strawberries. And he chose the sweet, fresh and vinegary strawberries as a means to offset foie gras' natural unctuous quality.

At First restaurant DeMarco follows the tradition of combining duck with fruit. But his soy-honey-marinated duck, $22, comes with an untraditional blackberry-Burgundy sauce. For the sauce he reduces red wine, red-wine vinegar and blackberries. After straining the reduction, he whisks in creme fraiche. Lavender honey, fresh blackberries and shredded apples garnish the duck entree.

A brand-new offering on the $98-to-$148 seven-course menu at the ultraluxurious Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Va., is squab marinated in blackberry vinegar and served over garlic polenta.

But berries also help to elevate food images in casual eateries across the nation. A new dish at Bob Evans, for instance, is raspberry grilled chicken salad with strawberries, pineapple, greens, blue cheese, red onions, scallions, bacon with pink raspberry vinaigrette.

The chain's "Farm-Fresh Salad" menu with salads priced between $4.49 and $7.29 also includes a chicken salad plate with "all white meat," grapes, celery, chopped pecans, melon, pineapple and strawberries served on a bed of lettuce.

A new blackberry deep-dish cobbler, which sells for $2.59, also was rolled out recently on the Bob Evans dessert menu, while the Oregon berry topping, which costs an additional 99 cents, remains part of the Bob Evans breakfast line. The pancake and waffle topping includes raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, marion berries and blueberries.

In Newark, N.J., at Theater Square Grill, one of the sit-down restaurants at the Performing Arts Center, pastry chef Powell poaches blackberries for a sauce he serves with house-made lemon meringue charlotte, $7. Powell cooks the berries with brandy, light brown sugar, orange zest and water for about eight minutes. Then he strains out the berries and thickens the liquid with pectin.

"It gives you a brilliant color, deep dark bluish purple, the color of the [raw] berries," Powell notes. And he explains that any unripe or sour blackberries are sweetened in the poaching process.

Pastry chef Michael Vandergeest also sweetened blackberries as he cooked them to a gel state for a dessert served earlier this month at a James Beard Foundation dinner prepared by the chefs of Lacroix at the Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia. Vandergeest teamed the berries up with redwine-and-cinnamon-poached pears and sour- cream sorbet flavored with pineapple, orange, lemon and lime for a direct contrast to the red fruit. For the gelled berries Vandergeest poached them with sugar, pectin, red wine, star anise, cinnamon, vanilla and lemon zest.

Chef-owner Robert Merrifield of the Polo Grill in Tulsa, Okla., also macerates berries and menus them as "drunken" berry and rhubarb ice-cream sandwich. But the fruit and ice cream changes with the seasons. Polo's spinach and strawberry salad with glazed pecans and sesame-poppy seed dressing, $4 -$7, however, remains the same throughout the year because, when it was removed at one point, customers nearly started a riot, Merrifield says.