Battle of the Pies, 2014: Pick your Pie

[chknltl]

39. Regarding the little Mountain Blackberry

I just did a little research and discovered that it is a precious berry indeed! I have always preferred it over the other two Blackberries but I had no idea that it is something of a delicacy. Chef's prize them for their bitter/sweet flavor and I read where pickers can get 30$ a quart for them. (btw, I once got 50$ a quart from a Chef for wild Huckleberries which became a sauce for a salmon dish). The Mountain Blackberry grows wild in my area of the Pacific Northwest, becoming available in July and lasting only a couple of weeks or so. We have them on our property and I generally get perhaps a gallon a season but they always get eaten immediately. I used to get the afore mentioned Wild Mountain Blackberry Pie up at the Copper Creek Restaurant decades ago and it always was my favorite (by far) pie. My mother would make a cobbler of them too, it was a far better cobbler than the ones she would make with the regular Blackberries, either would indeed be served right out of the oven and always with vanilla ice cream. Now that I have learned a bit just now about my favorite little berry I can hardly wait to start harvesting them this summer for pies and cobblers. Some wild Huckleberry jam sounds good too.