With Maine’s short but sweet (and delicious!) wild blueberry season upon us, local home cooks are already up to their aprons in blueberry muffins, cobblers, pies, jams and jellies.

But using these dark blue jewels just for baked goods and sweet dishes sells them short. Like most any fresh fruit, wild blueberries can lend beguiling complexity and depth of flavor to savory dishes, too.

Part of what makes wild blueberries more special and interesting than their cultivated counterparts is that a typical wild low-bush field hosts different varieties of wild blueberries. When they’re harvested, the sweeter varieties mingle with the tarter ones, creating a berry mélange with serious nuance.

David Yarborough, a former wild blueberry specialist at the University of Maine, said cultivated blueberries are harvested as single varieties. Eating a handful of cultivated blueberries is like eating a single apple variety, say a McIntosh, Yarborough said, while a handful of wild blueberries is more akin to eating a blend of apples like Honeycrisp, Granny Smith and McIntosh.

While the most obvious difference between wild and cultivated blueberries is their size – wild are smaller – Yarborough and others who know their stuff say the wild berries taste “more blueberry-like.”

“The high-bush people don’t like to hear it, but I’d say the wild blueberries taste better,” Yarborough said.

Maine’s blueberry crop is predominately wild. Yarborough said the state has about 40,000 acres of wild blueberries – compared to 300 acres of cultivated ones – yielding 80-100 million pounds of berries a year. It is the No. 1 producer of wild blueberries in the country.

“It’s looking like a good crop this year, too, as long as conditions hold,” Yarborough said.

We explored a few creative savory uses for wild blueberries, including some produced by Maine makers – Planet Naskeag in Brooklin makes piquant pickled berries, while Worcester’s Wild Blueberries in Orneville Township puts out a mild wild blueberry salsa. Also, Food Editor Peggy Grodinsky shares a recipe for Blueberry Gravlax that gives the salmon’s exterior an unusual deep purple hue.

And Maine’s Wild Blueberry Weekend is now underway, with more than 15 farms participating statewide. So when you find a source for local wild berries, be sure to try them in savory dishes – blueberries are far more versatile than you may know. – TIM CEBULA

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Maine Wild Blueberry Salsa from Worcester’s Wild Blueberry Farm 

Worcester’s Wild Blueberry Farm in Orneville Township, just north of Bangor, launched more than 40 years ago as a farm that sent its harvest to a processing plant Down East.

Worcester’s operation grew over time. Today, they harvest about 35 acres of wild blueberries – averaging between 65,000 and 80,000 pounds a year. Most of their fresh wild blueberry sales come from farmers markets and some stores, and they sell frozen blueberries as well, but they also ventured into offering a line of value-added products.

“We started a commercial kitchen a number of years ago,” said Everett Worcester, who runs the operation with his wife, Lee. “We started with blueberry jam, jelly and pie filling.”

Worcester said their wild blueberry jam, blueberry blossom honey and Maine blueberry syrup are the bestsellers of their 14 products, popular items for gifts and wedding favors. They also offer savory items like blueberry barbecue sauce, blueberry vinaigrette and blueberry salsa.

“From year to year, we start fiddling with recipes and new ideas. These things just happen,” Worcester said, explaining his inspiration for the salsa.

“I am the developer and the taste tester, and I keep fiddling with the recipe until I like its consistency and taste, and from that point on, it becomes the recipe,” Worcester said, estimating it took two to three months for him to nail the salsa recipe, about average for his products. “There’s nothing scientific about this, it’s just whatever pleases my palate.”

Besides blueberries, Worcester’s salsa contains sweet onions, green bell peppers, jalapeño, garlic cloves, diced tomato, tomato paste and tomato sauce. Worcester said the blend produces a “mild” salsa.

“The jalapeño peppers give it a little sharpness, but it’s not overwhelming,” he said. Worcester and his wife like to use it simply as a dip for tortilla chips, but he said it’d also pair nicely with grilled chicken or salmon.

Order Worcester’s Maine Wild Blueberry Salsa online, $7 for 12-ounce jar.

– TIM CEBULA

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Planet Naskeag Pickled Wild Blueberries

When Brazilian Silvia Mathewson moved to Brooklin with her American husband eight years ago, she quickly realized she’d have to find something new to do. An archivist and historian in Brazil, where the couple had been living for many years, she said she “didn’t see any possibility” for jobs at first.

Mathewson was an able and curious cook, though, and it didn’t take long before she found herself thinking, “Ah, I need to create something.” The “something” she eventually created is pickled blueberries, which she sells under her Planet Naskeag label in attractive 8-once jars, designed by her niece.

Blueberries were new to Mathewson when she arrived here. “My first contact with blueberries was Maine,” she said. “I met blueberries here.” But as she got to know one of the state’s most famous ingredients, it struck her that almost every producer took the same approach to the berries. “Jam, jelly all the time,” she said. “Sweet things. Muffins, pies, cakes. Just sweet. I propose a new approach.”

Mathewson had also become intrigued by pickles since moving to New England. “Pickles is a very old activity in New England. Canning,” she said. “In my country, pickling is not common.”

She decided to combine a traditional Maine ingredient, wild blueberries, with a traditional Maine technique, pickling, and then spent six months or so perfecting a recipe. Her product contains organic, local wild blueberries – although the company is not yet certified organic – apple cider vinegar, spices and sugar.

For now, Mathewson pickles the blueberries in her own kitchen, producing roughly 1,500 jars a year. She has big dreams, though. She’d like to sell the pickled blueberries throughout New England, even as far as New York. She applied to go on “Shark Tank.” Maybe later, her husband Kevin said they told her; he describes her as “the brains,” and himself, a librarian and translator, as “the muscle” behind Planet Naskeag. But she did get a $25,000 grant from Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development to develop the business.

The couple has plenty of ideas for how to use the pickled blueberries – in a salad with feta cheese, on grilled salmon, with roast duck or turkey, with goat cheese on crackers, and a spoonful stirred into a martini. Although the pickled blueberries are savory, a farmers market customer told them she’d tried them, and liked them, drizzled over vanilla ice cream. They haven’t tried that combination yet themselves.

“We’re not so bold,” Kevin Mathewson chuckled.

Find Planet Naskeag pickled blueberries at farmers markets in Stonington and Blue Hill, at the Belfast Community Coop and, locally, at Onggi in Portland and Lois’ Natural Marketplace in Scarborough for $9-$12 for an 8-ounce jar.

— PEGGY GRODINSKY

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Blueberry Gravlax 

Years ago, I scribbled down a quote from John F. Kennedy and stuck it on my fridge with a magnet, where it remains today: “Sometimes you look at what you’ve done and the only thing you ask yourself is, what took you so long to do it?” Kennedy was speaking about the momentous Civil Rights Act of 1963. Forgive me for applying his insight to something far more mundane.

Gravlax.

I’ve been meaning to make gravlax for years, yet somehow another recipe – salmon with miso-butter sauce, salmon cakes, salmon and pea pasta salad – always catches my eye and intervenes. But after overdoing it, as usual, at the u-pick blueberry farm a few weekends ago, I remembered a recipe for blueberry gravlax that I’d come across online. In late July, I finally gave gravlax a go.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, gravlax is a Swedish dish in which a side of raw salmon is weighted and cured for several days in salt, sugar and usually dill. When it’s ready, it’s sliced very thin, like lox, and served (in Sweden) with mustard sauce and (at my house) piled on a pumpernickel bagel with ricotta cheese, lemon, chives and dill. Another day, I’d have reached for cream cheese or goat cheese, but ricotta was what I had in the fridge, and a lasting culinary lesson I took from the pandemic was not to run to the store for a single ingredient, to make do.

As it turns out, gravlax requires just 10 minutes’ work to make, and you will be inordinately proud of yourself if you do. The pretty pink slices of salmon have a pearly translucence, a silky mouthfeel, and a mildly salty appeal.

The two hardest things about making it, I learned, are waiting patiently while it cures, and slicing it neatly once it has.

If push came to shove, I’m not sure I could have identified the blueberry flavor if I hadn’t known it was there. A subtle sweetness, perhaps? I’ve also seen recipes for gravlax that call for beets. Maybe these ingredients are meant mostly to add color? That color, by the way, never really penetrated the body of the salmon; it mostly colored a thin layer of flesh at the surface. But that didn’t detract in the least from the recipe’s ease and delectability.

The only thing I am asking myself is, what took me so long?

— PEGGY GRODINSKY

Blueberry-Coriander Gravlax 

This recipe comes from the online website tastecooking.com. I’ve adjusted it slightly. They suggest you eat the gravlax with rye bread and horseradish sauce. I used high-bush blueberries, but I am sure wild blueberries would work just fine, as well. This is one of those recipes that’s all about the quality of the ingredients, so be sure to start with a very nice piece of fish – no problem for you, lucky Mainer.

1½ pounds salmon with skin, pin-bones removed
¼ cup kosher salt
¼ cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons vodka
1 cup blueberries
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cracked black pepper
1 teaspoon fresh lime zest

Pat the salmon dry with a clean paper towel and place it flesh side up on a large sheet of parchment paper or plastic wrap.

Mix the salt and sugar in a small bowl and rub both sides of the fish with it. Now drizzle the vodka over the flesh of the fish.

In a mortar and pestle, crush the blueberries with the coriander seeds until coarse and stir in the black pepper and lime zest. Spoon the mixture over the surface of the fish.

Wrap the fish with the ends of the parchment paper and then with a sheet of aluminum foil. Place the wrapped salmon in a tray and then place a flat 3-lb weight, such as a small cast-iron or ceramic dish, over the fish. Place it in the refrigerator and flip the fish every 8 to 12 hours, draining off the juice that comes off the fish, as necessary. The gravlax will be ready within 36 to 48 hours when it is firm to touch.

Wash off the marinade. Carefully dry the fish, and then slice it paper-thin with a very sharp knife. I’ve read that, as with strudel dough, you should be able to read the newspaper through the slices. My salmon section was rather wide, and my knife not wide enough, so I found it helpful to cut the salmon in two vertically and then slice the gravlax.

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