Taste test: The best supermarket strawberries for sweetness and texture
Strawberries, Wimbledon, rain, the Great British summer is here again. Mind you, it has not – to put it mildly – been a promising year for our national berry, with the crop delayed by two weeks. It’s not so much that relentless rain has been the problem, as polytunnels have protected the British fruit since the 1990s, but rather the light levels, which have been the lowest in years. Strawberries need sunshine to ripen well, and it’s been in short supply.
Undeterred, Nick Marston, the chairman of the industry body British Berry Growers, told me phlegmatically, “With the UK season, we go in optimistically hoping that this year it will all work out.” That’s the proper British spirit. Marston is also keen to stress that slower-growing plants produce better-tasting fruit. Could this be true – or wishful thinking?
So, reader, I tasted the strawberries. Unlike with ketchup, say, or ready-made lasagne, it’s a far from definitive test. The strawberries I picked up from the supermarket may not have come from the same grower as the ones that you find; the variety may not be the same; and the weather conditions in which they were grown will definitely be different. But I was interested to see if the premium brands stood out against the standard versions.
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The taste test
Favori variety. Impressively huge (one weighs 60g), but despite the name, these are sour, hard and underripe. Some have comedic shapes – nothing wrong with that, except the protuberances are crunchy and tannic.
Favori variety. Medium texture, and on the small side. Dull red with a deep white collar around the stem. The flavour is incredibly bland: dull berries.
Blush variety. Smallish, and very pale pinky orange. Hard and underripe (a few have oddly gone mushy) with a sour, slightly tannic flavour and the merest whiff of strawberry. Sad stuff.
Lady Isabella variety. The colour is a mixture of mid-red and worryingly pale. The most pigmented are medium-firm and have a light tang and a mild flavour, while the mushy ones are grimly sour with not much else going on.
Driscoll’s Zara variety. Good-looking, medium-sized strawberries with an even colour that’s red to the stem. These are firm and rather seedy textured, tasting sweet and very tangy, but with only a hint of strawberry flavour. Would be OK with vanilla ice cream.
RD4 variety. Large, beautiful strawberries with an even heart shape. Despite their attractiveness, they’re slightly crunchy, which isn’t a good thing. There’s a sweet tang, but not a lot of other flavour – rather too sour.
Murano variety. Slightly bouncy with some perfumed flavour, however they’re not sour. Hardly thrilling, though – dull, dull, dull.
Small strawberries with a decent texture. There’s not a lot of flavour, but they’re better than the other option from Aldi.
Medium-large Ania strawberries that are red to the stem. Very sour with a soft, waxy texture. These would be fine in a Victoria sandwich, but not for snacking.
MC1 variety. Quite subtle in flavour with a decent sweet-sour balance. Attractive and glossy with a narrow white collar around the stem.
Orange-red Eve’s delight strawberries. Very hard with a crunchy texture. Lots of sweet and sour flavours but not much else.
Prize variety. Small-ish fruit that’s white in the middle. There’s a mild flavour that’s verging on bland, but they’re not too firm and are juicy and yielding.
Another Eve’s delight. These are way too firm – they’re almost tough, with a crunch like an apple. A hint of strawberry flavour but a slightly harsh, tannic aftertaste.
Favori strawbs that have a firmly gelatinous texture, and glossy, light red appearance. They have a reasonable sweetness about them.
Slightly battered looking. Some bite to them but the flavour balance is fine, though I think it could be stronger.
Ania variety with a lovely soft texture (including the hull) and a mellow, tangy strawberry flavour. Medium sized, and a nice, even mid red colour, so they’ll look lovely on a pavlova.
Mixed size Favori variety, fairly even bright crimson, and very soft, some on the cusp of overripe. They are intensely strawberry-ish, though the hull is slightly crunchy.
Medium-sized Driscoll’s Zara strawbs with a delicate texture and a perfumed quality. Sweet, not much tang, but definitely strawberry-ish.
The rules for the test
I was looking for flavour and some sweetness, of course – no one wants a bland, sour berry. But a great strawberry is also one with a soft, juicy texture. A crunchy strawberry is wrong. Yet many of the berries I tried were hard, even once I’d brought them up to room temperature (cold strawberries never taste their best). It’s a problem for retailers: a really good strawberry is also a delicate one, and that will inevitably look a bit battered in the box.
I did notice that strawberries that had been left spread on a tray for several hours started to soften and become more fragrant and powerful-tasting, even as they lost their lipstick-coloured gloss. This is what I will be doing with my strawberries this year. Never mind the looks, check out the flavour.
As for the varieties, there are two main types. Until the 1980s, all strawberries were autumn-planted “June bearers” – varieties such as Elsanta, Malling centenary, and sonata. These fruit for around three weeks, generally in June but sometimes a week or two earlier or later, and the season runs for six weeks, finishing just after Wimbledon.
In the 1980s, varieties called “everbearers” and “day-neutrals” were developed, which are planted in spring and fruit from July until the first frosts, so October or even November. Favori, Albion and Mount Everest fall into this category.
It’s not just these varieties that have stretched the season to lengths unimaginable to our great-grandparents. The much-maligned polytunnels have a major part to play. They may not be beautiful, but without the ubiquitous plastic arcs, says Marston, “if it rained, then strawberries would be ruined. Growers had to pick all the waste off and throw it away. And they’d probably be out of production for two or three or four days while other berries started to ripen.” Even a light shower could result in mushy or mildew-ridden strawbs.
After the revolution in all-weather production and longer seasons, the next development was the top-tier strawberry. Driscoll’s jubilee was the pioneer, bred in Kent for the California-based growers Driscoll’s and released in 2002. Lower-yielding, so expensive to produce, it’s intensely flavoured, justifying a higher price, though it was felt to be a bit small.
Other, larger, premium strawberries followed including, in 2012, Malling centenary, bred at West Malling in Kent, where the strawberry programme is now run by the German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Bayer. Some now find their way into both standard and premium packs, notably favori. Size matters, according to Marston, because we consumers prefer a bigger strawberry, and also (possibly more saliently) because they are faster and more cost-effective to pick.
The cost of production is a huge issue for farmers. It has increased massively over the past three years, largely because of increased labour costs, which account for 50 per cent of the total spend. “If you want people to do hourly paid work, they have to be paid appropriately,” emphasises Marston. But the prices “really haven’t reflected those cost increases”.
Then there is the issue of “phytosanitary certificates”, which verify that agricultural products have been inspected and are pest and disease free. Since the UK left the European Union, these have been required for all fruit travelling over the Channel. With retailers placing orders two days ahead, and the shelf life of the strawberries being barely longer than that, the additional days required to book a government plant health inspector put a potentially disastrous delay into the system.
British strawberry exports have never been huge, it’s true. According to World Bank data, we export about $9 million (£7 million) worth but import more than 30 times that value. Only the United States, Canada and Germany (which, incidentally, takes most of the British exports) spend more on shipped-in strawberries.
The dial may be moving on those imports at least. The Summer Berry Company in Chichester, West Sussex, is planning to produce strawberries year-round in its glasshouses, using heat pumps for power and LED lighting. No doubt others will follow, although the summer ones will always, surely, be best.
