Think blueberries, and you think pie.
But these blue beauties, at the height of their season in Maryland right now, are ready to break out of that familiar lattice-topped role. Home cooks and professional chefs alike have found the berry's not-too-tart, not-too-sweet flavor lends itself to many savory uses.
At Clementine restaurant in Hamilton, chef and co-owner Winston Blick uses the fruit in a blueberry-basil salad vinaigrette, in a jammy compound butter served on pork chops and in a side dish of sauteed greens and house-cured bacon. They even turn up in the restaurant's paté.
"For some reason, it works well with the savory or salty things," Blick said. "The part of the blueberry pie that's great is the blueberry [filling] with the salty crust."
He described blueberries as "well-balanced," meaning they are neither super-sweet nor super-sour.
"They don't punch you in the nose," he said. "So it goes with things."
Like chicken livers, believe it or not.
Blick incorporates dried blueberries that have been macerated in a Boordy Vineyards berry wine into his buttery, silky paté. (It might not quite qualify as health food, but it's high in iron and still better than pie, right?)
"You get that little burst of fruit, and it's just lovely," said his wife and business partner, Cristin Dadant.
Restaurant patrons are sometimes surprised to see blueberries show up outside the dessert menu. No one blinks at the blueberry double-layer cake with lemon butter cream, prepared by the chef's mother. But the blueberry-bacon butter listed with the pork chop?
"People come in and say, 'Blueberry-bacon butter?' And I'll say, 'Just try it,' '" Dadant said.
The blueberry-bacon butter in question came about when Blick was looking for a fruity topping for pork. The sweet-toothed chef created a jammy concoction. His cooks pushed it in the direction of a compound butter. Eventually, he said, it "found its true place between the two."
One iteration along the way turned out "brilliantly purple."
"It was amazing," Blick said. "It would melt on the chop, melt down next to the mashed potatoes. It was this hugely beet purple."
The vivid color of the cooked berry in savory dishes puts off some people.
"It looks like a crime scene" is how Baltimore food blogger Kathy Patterson described the blueberry ketchup she developed last year for a recipe contest sponsored by the U.S. Highbush Blueberry Council.
Still, she would make it again for use in a blueberry barbecue sauce she cooked up for shredded pork shoulder.
"Blueberries have their own intrinsic spice when you cook them up," said Patterson, who blogs about recipes and local restaurants at minxeats.com. "They have their own zing."
Jerry Edwards, owner of Chef's Expressions Catering and Consulting, is not a fan of the color either.
"Blue is not a good food color," he said. "It's a gorgeous color, but not to eat."
Except in desserts. "Desserts are whimsical, so they work out just fine [with blue]," he said. "Putting a blueberry sauce on a fish? … It's not an easy color."
That said, Edwards makes a blueberry-onion marmalade that he serves over lemon grilled chicken. In that dish, the berries are combined with caramelized onions, resulting in a color he finds more appetizing.
"You're really putting a brown and blue together, and you're getting sort of a ruby color," he said.
Blueberries are one of those good-for-you foods that taste good to most people, so they don't have to be snuck into foods the way Jessica Seinfeld and other stealthy-mom cookbook authors have done with the likes of spinach. Which isn't to say people haven't tried slipping blueberries into foods where they don't usually belong.
Alfred Bushway, a University of Maine professor of food science and human nutrition, came up with a blueberry hamburger recipe back in 2001. Beyond finding a new use for one of Maine's top agricultural products, the blueberry burger was intended to make warmed-over school lunch burgers taste less warmed-over.
Because most school kitchens aren't equipped to do anything but reheat precooked foods, cafeteria hamburgers tend to have a "metallic" leftovers taste, Bushway said. There's a chemical reaction to blame, called lipid oxidization, which refers to the fats in the meat reacting with oxygen. Bushway found that adding up to 2.4 ounces of pureed blueberries per pound of ground beef prevented the warmed-over flavor for the same reason blueberries are good for humans: They are rich in antioxidants.
But his blueberry hamburger helper, if you will, never caught on commercially.
Because the berries are so rich in cancer-fighting antioxidants, the quest to incorporate them into more foods continues.
Maryland cookbook author Lucie Snodgrass did a double take recently at the pet food store, where she spotted a blueberry-sausage dog treat.
"I laughed my head off," said Snodgrass, author of the recently released "Dishing up Maryland."
