Strawberry season is just around the corner, we will be ready with our “OH WOW Frozen Biscuits". Why don't we just bake the biscuits here, and for that matter why don't we sell strawberry shortcakes?

To me, a strawberry shortcake is one of those simple and elegant marriages of warm and cold, soft and crisp, sweet and acidic, juicy and biscuit-y. It is exquisite and ephemeral. Each year I wait for it with great anticipation and I morn the passing strawberry season. Yes, you can freeze the macerated berries but it is nothing like holding a pint of fresh berries under your nose.

The quintessential ingredients of a strawberry shortcake are tender, fresh, delicate berries, real whipped cream, and a biscuit fresh from the oven. I wouldn't waste a good biscuit with shipped strawberries, they have been bred to stand up to travel and are huge. What is this tough white fibrous center of a shipped berry? Why aren’t they red? I want smaller flavorful tender juicy berries that grow locally. The best strawberries I ever had were tiny little “Alpine” berries and I only got a handful. Some day…

Peak strawberry season can be as short as two weeks and there are some years where none of the berries reach perfection. They want sunlight and consistent water with good drainage. If it is too hot, they don’t set fruit. If there is too much rain, the flavor gets diluted. All you can do is wail, gnash your teeth, rend your clothing and wait until next year while enjoying some second-rate shortcake.

I find the freshest berries at the farmer’s market and they need to be eaten or macerated as soon as possible. Even one day in the refrigerator will show some deterioration. Macerate simply means that you soften food in a liquid. In this case, the liquid will be strawberry juice that is drawn out by adding sugar to chopped and/or mashed strawberries. If you can’t eat the berries the day you buy them, then macerate and refrigerate them and they will keep for a couple of days. How much sugar? Taste it as you go. Let the berries sit on the counter. If they are at room temperature you will be able to taste more of their loveliness.

And the biscuit - ah the biscuit. If we baked the biscuits in the bakery, by the time you could get them home they would be stale. A biscuit wants, nae needs, to be eaten right out of the oven. Have everything ready when they emerge and quickly assemble and serve your shortcake so that you retain the heat of the biscuit, the enticing aroma of the strawberries, the perfect sweetness of the juice, the cold luxuriousness of the whipped cream. Try to get a little of each in every bite! It doesn’t get any better than that.

Of course, the biscuits also go really well with other berries, peaches, honey, other fruits, and gravy so you should probably stock up now. I know that it is easy to whip up a batch of biscuits, (not to mention cheaper!), but I usually only want one or two biscuits at a time. With Oh Wow Frozen Biscuits, I can indulge myself in the time it takes to heat the oven without having to deal with the rest of a batch after it is stale.

There are other things I’m supposed to talk about in this email, but I don’t wish to dilute the strawberry story so I will sign off.

Love,
Judy