Sea-salty Roasted Strawberries

Howdy friends,

It’s Elyse with another recipe. If you aren’t following my substack, I post some casual baking recipes and random thoughts over there. I thought about putting this recipe on substack, but I felt this one would be more appropriate for the blog. How I decide what goes where is like an ambiguous feeling…

I’ve been buying a lot of strawberries since they’ve been on sale, but the sale strawberries get all squishy and moldy in as little as a day. It feels like a chore to do this whole process, especially because I have to do it the day of buying the strawberries (dang sale strawberries). But it’s so worth it because you can have fragrant strawberries in your freezer for whenever you need. More importantly, it helps avoid a future where I have to throw out an organics bin full of $5 fuzzy, bruised strawberries :sad face:

Sea-salty Roasted Strawberries is easy way to boost flavor and life into fragile, delicate strawberries. These strawberries are salty, tart and have this amazing fragrance of summer-ripened fruit. The sea salt may seem overpowering, and I wouldn’t recommend eating this on it’s own. But especially in combination with creamy, full-bodied desserts, it becomes so balanced and flavorful.

First tossed in sugar, spice, and everything nice, these strawberries then are left to cook in their own juices. As the maillard reaction works its magic, the strawberries transform even the saddest, most flavorless of strawberries. They become bright, tart, and ruby-red. You end up with an essentially summer-peak strawberries and a syrup that’s probably most excellent for cocktails and sodas (a daiquiri maybe?) or drizzled on vanilla ice cream. It’s a recipe that is so easy to customize too! You can scale up or down. If you don’t like the salt, you can reduce it to just a pinch. You can omit the lemon juice or substitute the flavors with whatever you want. The key is to lightly perfume the strawberries; definitely don’t go overboard with the flavors, and don’t waste a fresh vanilla bean for this.

This is basically an imitation of the roasted strawberries by Stella Parks, just with a fun little reskin.

Difficulty: so easy!
Serving: easily scale up or down
Equipment: oven, roasting pan

Ingredients:

500g fresh strawberries (never frozen)
80g sugar
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 sad, dried out, used up vanilla bean
1/8 tsp rose water or orange blossom water
1/4 lemon worth of juice

Wash and dry strawberries. I’ll also pick out the ones that look the most beautiful for plating or other applications. Cut off the leafy tops, but minimize waste since all the fruit can be used here. Have a total of 500g of cut, clean strawberries.
Toss the strawberries with the sugar, salt, and flavorings.
Bake at 375F for 30 minutes
Cool before transferring to a container to fridge or freeze

In an airtight container, good in the fridge for up to 14 days and in the freezer indefinitely.