Well this year has shown a bumper crop of most of my foraged fruits and although I use haws as a great natural setting agent for my fruit leathers and some sweat and sour syrups I still had it in my mind that I was not using them to their full potential ,
I remember reading some time ago about haws being used to make flour during the war but that's as far as it went I struggled to find any documentation reference the process ,and flour is one of my most valued commodities within my wild food larder .
I'm relatively proficient In making flour from acorns and indeed several different nuts but it became quite apparent that the process was to be considerably different .
The first obstacle I knew I would have was the fact that harvesting was not the easiest with the large defensive thorns that the hawthorn sports as it's natural defence from natural foragers and the fact that because of its high moisture content my pick would have to be quite considerable if I was to make a usable amount of flour .
I own a berrie picker which I' have become quite accustomed to but to be honest the thorns are more than a match for the picker and getting caught up was to regular for this to be a effective method ,picking by hand was not difficult but in reflection not pleasant and I was pricked quite severely and the following day my hands were quite sore and inflamed and this brought up the questions for me , are the thorns poisonous , do they carrie any natural bacteria as defence ,
So the answers are .
No, they're not poisonous. But pathogenic bacteria like Clostridium perfringens have been isolated and identified from common hawthorn (with red aposematic thorns), which can cause gangrene.
I also found a well-documented case of Curtobacterium human infection, a child with septic arthritis following puncture with a Coxspur Hawthorn plant thorn which raises obvious concerns and a good reason to find a more productive harvesting technique .
I've harvested sea buckthorn by holding the branches and tapping them over a container and decided to give this a try at first this worked well and was much quicker and without the risk of spiking myself I picked up quite a lot of stray leaf matter but this was no hardship ,my only thought is that next time I will simply lay a tarp out and knock the fruits strait onto that and that will remove any chance waste .
Now I don't want to profess to be any authority on the matter as this is my first year at processing in this way and this is purely a record of my results .
The first thing you need to know about the Hawthorn berries is you should not eat the seeds. They contain cyanide bonded with sugar, called amygdalin. In your gut actually small intestine that changes to hydrogen cyanide and can be deadly.
This isn't going to happen by eating the occasional seed but it's a fact and you need to take this into account and I have to portray the facts as I know them ,and the chemicals are only present in the seed so removing them is a must ( another fact is that by cooking the fruit the cyanide is dispersed ) .
So I decided to try three ways of processing these being , roasting and then grinding, air drying and then grinding and pulping and drying and grinding .
When air drying the berries I have and lots of experience in the past with other fruits ,what I found works best is a rack I've made from stretched netting which are about 12x24" and then stacked with a minimum of 50mm between each rack to allow air flow ,it's really important that you place your racks somewhere where the air is dry and constant or the drying becomes difficult as re saturation is the main cause of mould on the berries ,daily checking is needed as if mould is present any infected berries need to be discarded as soon as possible to stop it spreading and the lose of the entire harvest .
Drying in this way depending on the weather can take between 10-20 days so in no way is a fast way to go about it but has its own apparent positives the main being not loosing any of the nutrients through heat .
The next part of the process is removing the seed once dry I did this by rolling the dried fruits under weight this splits the fruit and then there doesn't seem to be any way of removing the seed other than simply picking them out and boy does this take time .
After this you need to grind the remainder it seems my usual method of motor and pestle doesn't work to well so I resulted to a coffee grinder ( one would presume that a grinding stone would make short work of this part of the process . The end result was a course flour which was fruity and extremely pleasant to the taste .
My next process was roasting I adopted the roasting method I use for coffee from roots which is double convection by placing a smaller pot into a dutch oven ,this initially didn't work as the berries releases a huge amount of moisture which they basically boiled in turning them to pulp ,so I pierced the base tray and allowed the liquid to sit in the base of the dutch oven away from the berries my biggest tip at this mark is to continuously remove the liquid to prevent steaming ( you also then have a base for syrup ) .
I had a choice at this point to grind with the seeds as the heat will have neutralised the cyanide or to remove them and process them in the same way as the dried ,
My only option really was to do both so I removed approximately a pound of roasted berry and ground them with a mortar and pestle which worked well but left the quite fine flour with very little taste of haws more a nutty taste than a fruity taste ,
The second amount of the batch I rolled and removed the seeds from the mix ( I cannot stress how long this takes ) the major factor which was surprising was the very small amount of flour I ended with it ground perfectly with a less fruity taste but probably yields a 10% product to initial harvest ratio compared to the air drying which is at a third and the with seeds roasted which is at fifty percent product return from initial harvest
Last and not least was to pulp the berries ,use a large bowl and a potato masher or similar you may need to add water to get a good pulp ,once the berries are pulped the seeds floated to the top so made short work of the previous laborious task .
I then spread the pulp onto trays at 5mm thickness and left them to air dry .
I know from making leather that this was not going to dry to a point where I could grind it to a flour . I decided on scratching the mix up when at a point where the moisture content allowed it .this seems to work well but is very time consuming over four to five weeks every other day also taking the same care to continually check for mould ( a pine come works very well for the scratching up process ) the end result is a fluffy flour with a nice fruity flavour .
So in short each process had pros and cons ,the roasting method was by far the quickest process but yielded the lowest quality regarding taste yet the consistency was the closest to conventional flour out of the three . Where as the mulching process rewarded good flour the time in labour alone made it quite difficult to allocate the needed time ,
My preferred method due to taste was the air drying method although the flour was quite course it was really much more palatable than the others and I suspect it retains more of its natural goodness and after dry they can be stored for later processing . my aim is to find a easier process to remove the seed .
So the question is WHY? is there good enough reason to process haws as flour well I've found some of the reasons why consumption of the nutrients contained within haws are well worth the efforts these include ,Lower blood pressure,Increase the effectiveness of the heart's pumping action,Strengthen the heart muscle,Slow the heartbeat,Dilate coronary arteries,Prevent heart disease, heart attack, and stroke,Help those healing from heart surgery,Support the immune system,Increase longevity
So in short in my opinion yes it's another sustainable resource that I will be making use of and hopefully perfect
@mouseinthewood
I remember reading some time ago about haws being used to make flour during the war but that's as far as it went I struggled to find any documentation reference the process ,and flour is one of my most valued commodities within my wild food larder .
I'm relatively proficient In making flour from acorns and indeed several different nuts but it became quite apparent that the process was to be considerably different .
The first obstacle I knew I would have was the fact that harvesting was not the easiest with the large defensive thorns that the hawthorn sports as it's natural defence from natural foragers and the fact that because of its high moisture content my pick would have to be quite considerable if I was to make a usable amount of flour .
I own a berrie picker which I' have become quite accustomed to but to be honest the thorns are more than a match for the picker and getting caught up was to regular for this to be a effective method ,picking by hand was not difficult but in reflection not pleasant and I was pricked quite severely and the following day my hands were quite sore and inflamed and this brought up the questions for me , are the thorns poisonous , do they carrie any natural bacteria as defence ,
So the answers are .
No, they're not poisonous. But pathogenic bacteria like Clostridium perfringens have been isolated and identified from common hawthorn (with red aposematic thorns), which can cause gangrene.
I also found a well-documented case of Curtobacterium human infection, a child with septic arthritis following puncture with a Coxspur Hawthorn plant thorn which raises obvious concerns and a good reason to find a more productive harvesting technique .
I've harvested sea buckthorn by holding the branches and tapping them over a container and decided to give this a try at first this worked well and was much quicker and without the risk of spiking myself I picked up quite a lot of stray leaf matter but this was no hardship ,my only thought is that next time I will simply lay a tarp out and knock the fruits strait onto that and that will remove any chance waste .
Now I don't want to profess to be any authority on the matter as this is my first year at processing in this way and this is purely a record of my results .
The first thing you need to know about the Hawthorn berries is you should not eat the seeds. They contain cyanide bonded with sugar, called amygdalin. In your gut actually small intestine that changes to hydrogen cyanide and can be deadly.
This isn't going to happen by eating the occasional seed but it's a fact and you need to take this into account and I have to portray the facts as I know them ,and the chemicals are only present in the seed so removing them is a must ( another fact is that by cooking the fruit the cyanide is dispersed ) .
So I decided to try three ways of processing these being , roasting and then grinding, air drying and then grinding and pulping and drying and grinding .
When air drying the berries I have and lots of experience in the past with other fruits ,what I found works best is a rack I've made from stretched netting which are about 12x24" and then stacked with a minimum of 50mm between each rack to allow air flow ,it's really important that you place your racks somewhere where the air is dry and constant or the drying becomes difficult as re saturation is the main cause of mould on the berries ,daily checking is needed as if mould is present any infected berries need to be discarded as soon as possible to stop it spreading and the lose of the entire harvest .
Drying in this way depending on the weather can take between 10-20 days so in no way is a fast way to go about it but has its own apparent positives the main being not loosing any of the nutrients through heat .
The next part of the process is removing the seed once dry I did this by rolling the dried fruits under weight this splits the fruit and then there doesn't seem to be any way of removing the seed other than simply picking them out and boy does this take time .
After this you need to grind the remainder it seems my usual method of motor and pestle doesn't work to well so I resulted to a coffee grinder ( one would presume that a grinding stone would make short work of this part of the process . The end result was a course flour which was fruity and extremely pleasant to the taste .
My next process was roasting I adopted the roasting method I use for coffee from roots which is double convection by placing a smaller pot into a dutch oven ,this initially didn't work as the berries releases a huge amount of moisture which they basically boiled in turning them to pulp ,so I pierced the base tray and allowed the liquid to sit in the base of the dutch oven away from the berries my biggest tip at this mark is to continuously remove the liquid to prevent steaming ( you also then have a base for syrup ) .
I had a choice at this point to grind with the seeds as the heat will have neutralised the cyanide or to remove them and process them in the same way as the dried ,
My only option really was to do both so I removed approximately a pound of roasted berry and ground them with a mortar and pestle which worked well but left the quite fine flour with very little taste of haws more a nutty taste than a fruity taste ,
The second amount of the batch I rolled and removed the seeds from the mix ( I cannot stress how long this takes ) the major factor which was surprising was the very small amount of flour I ended with it ground perfectly with a less fruity taste but probably yields a 10% product to initial harvest ratio compared to the air drying which is at a third and the with seeds roasted which is at fifty percent product return from initial harvest
Last and not least was to pulp the berries ,use a large bowl and a potato masher or similar you may need to add water to get a good pulp ,once the berries are pulped the seeds floated to the top so made short work of the previous laborious task .
I then spread the pulp onto trays at 5mm thickness and left them to air dry .
I know from making leather that this was not going to dry to a point where I could grind it to a flour . I decided on scratching the mix up when at a point where the moisture content allowed it .this seems to work well but is very time consuming over four to five weeks every other day also taking the same care to continually check for mould ( a pine come works very well for the scratching up process ) the end result is a fluffy flour with a nice fruity flavour .
So in short each process had pros and cons ,the roasting method was by far the quickest process but yielded the lowest quality regarding taste yet the consistency was the closest to conventional flour out of the three . Where as the mulching process rewarded good flour the time in labour alone made it quite difficult to allocate the needed time ,
My preferred method due to taste was the air drying method although the flour was quite course it was really much more palatable than the others and I suspect it retains more of its natural goodness and after dry they can be stored for later processing . my aim is to find a easier process to remove the seed .
So the question is WHY? is there good enough reason to process haws as flour well I've found some of the reasons why consumption of the nutrients contained within haws are well worth the efforts these include ,Lower blood pressure,Increase the effectiveness of the heart's pumping action,Strengthen the heart muscle,Slow the heartbeat,Dilate coronary arteries,Prevent heart disease, heart attack, and stroke,Help those healing from heart surgery,Support the immune system,Increase longevity
So in short in my opinion yes it's another sustainable resource that I will be making use of and hopefully perfect
@mouseinthewood
and thank you 
