Aronia Berry Vinaigrette

I decided that it was time to add some more salads and savoury dishes into both my life and our roster of fruity recipes. It’s so easy to bake desserts with fruit, but they can also make wonderful additions to your main meals! To that end, here is a quick aronia berry vinaigrette recipe that can very easily be modified to suit what you’ve got on hand in your kitchen and pantry. I found the original recipe on Forager Chef, and below is an outline of what I did for my version of this dressing.

Ingredients:

1 cup fresh or frozen aronia berries (also known as chokeberries)

1/3 cup raw honey + 2 TBSP of Nith Valley Apiaries’ turmeric ginger honey with black pepper and cayenne

2/3 cup onion, roughly diced

¼ tsp kosher salt

1/8 tsp fresh ground black pepper

¼ cup water

1 cup cider vinegar (I used ¼ cup of my homemade firecider and ¼ cup apple cider vinegar)

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 cup avocado oil

Method:

I simply added all ingredients except the oil into my blender. My aronia berries were frozen and I blended everything into a liquid before I started slowly pouring in the oil to emulsify it (blender continues to run as you pour in the oil). Once the mixture was thickened I jarred it up in some little jars to share with the staff here at Silver Creek Nursery and popped them all into the fridge to bring with me into work the next day!

The vinaigrette as it stands with the ingredient list above was more sweet than tangy, and I’m inclined to try it again and add some of my frozen ginger ( I love freezing fresh ginger – it’s so much easier to grate from frozen, if you haven’t tried it you should!) and also switch to just 1/3 cup of the turmeric ginger honey, or try out adding Dijon mustard as per the original recipe.  I’d also like to try it with red wine vinegar per the original recipe, but I’ll have to buy some first! Fortunately, vinaigrettes are quite versatile and you can really modify them to suit both your tastes and what you have available. Try out any of your fresh or frozen berries for a fruit-forward and colourful salad dressing!

I also found a neat chili recipe that uses aronia berries, and hope to try it out this month yet - if it turns out yummy you'll definitely be hearing about it here on the blog!

Aronia berries are a wonderful low-maintenance berry bush option that offers high nutrition value in vitamin C, manganese and fibre, along with vitamin K, folate, iron, and vitamins A and E in smaller amounts. They’re also considered among the richest sources of antioxidants and are particularly high in anthocyanins. If you’re not growing one yet, you can be! We offer several varieties and they have all been performing really well in our test orchard.

Authored by Jodi Roth