Freeze Dried Blueberry

What it is

This is not a blueberry. Not the large, pale, cultivated kind you find in a supermarket punnet. This is Vaccinium myrtillus, the European wild bilberry, freeze-dried whole. It grows low to the ground in the boreal forests of Finland, unplanted and untended. It is smaller than a cultivated highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) and darker, and when you bite into one the flesh is deep purple all the way through. A cultivated blueberry is pale inside.

That colour is anthocyanin, the pigment that stains your fingers and your teeth. In a bilberry it runs through the whole fruit, not only the skin. For the long version, read our guide to wild bilberry versus cultivated blueberry.

The ingredients list is one word: bilberry. No added sugar, no preservatives, no fillers. Contains naturally occurring sugars. 90 g in a resealable doypack.

How it is made

The berries are hand-picked in the wild from mid-July to early September. They are frozen after harvest, and the water is then removed under vacuum at low temperature while the berry is still frozen. That is freeze-drying. The berry is never cooked, so it keeps its shape, its sharpness and its colour, and it comes out of the process light and crisp. We explain the method in what freeze-drying is and why it is used for wild bilberry. Packing happens in Nurmijärvi, Finland.

What it tastes like

Tart, with an almost wine-like intensity. Not supermarket sweetness. The texture is a light crunch that gives way to a burst of concentrated bilberry, and the colour on your fingers afterwards is deep purple. They are easy to eat straight from the bag, which is a problem only if you had other plans for them.

How to use it

Eat them as they are. Stir them into porridge or yogurt, where they rehydrate slightly and burst when you bite them. Add them to granola or trail mix, or bake with them. If you would rather measure the same berry by the teaspoon, our freeze-dried bilberry powder is the same fruit, ground.

Storage and clumping

Keep the bag sealed, in a cool, dry place, out of direct light. Freeze-dried berries stay crisp while the bag is closed and take on moisture from the air when it is not, so reseal the doypack after each use. There are no anti-caking agents in the bag, no silicon dioxide, nothing but the berries.

Origin, food safety and shipping

The bilberries are wild, hand-picked in Finnish forests under everyman’s right. Kylmä Co. is under Finnish food-safety supervision; the Oiva inspection report is published on this site.

They are not organic-certified.

Web-shop parcels go to Finland, the EU, Switzerland and the UK; trade orders ship worldwide, including Japan, China, Korea, Singapore and all Asian markets. Buying for a shop, café or kitchen? See the wholesale page: no minimum order, and free samples.