A few weeks ago a group of us took a road trip up to North Wales to a festival called The Good Life Experience. It was amazing! The festival was curated by Cerys Matthews (my fav) and was a weekend full of culture, food and the great outdoors. After a serious case of post festival blues, my friend Lyndsey from What You Sow and I decided to spend a day outdoors together to get that festival feeling back.
One of the activities at the festival was a foraging walk. Feeling inspired, we took to the woods. This time of year is a great time for foraging with blackberries, elderberries and sloes all up for grabs. But on this occasion we were on the lookout for a different berry, the hawberry, which would be our main ingredient in a delicious savoury sauce.
It didn’t take us long to find them and before we knew it we’d managed to fill a whole trug! We made two types of sauces – ketchup and our take on HP sauce (HB Sauce, get it hehe).
Ingredients – HB Sauce
500g Hawberries
300ml Water
300ml Apple cider vinegar
150g Date syrup
30g Light brown sugar
1 Garlic clove (grated)
½ tsp Ground ginger
¼ tsp Chilli flakes
Salt and pepper
Ingredients – Hawberry Ketchup
500g Hawberries
300ml Water
300ml Apple cider vinegar
150g Light brown sugar
Salt and pepper
Method
- De-stalk the hawberries and wash them thoroughly.
- Put the berries in a large saucepan with the water and apple cider vinegar, bring to the boil then let simmer for approximately 30 minutes or until the berries are soft.
- Sieve the softened berries into a bowl making sure you push all the juice out of them with a wooden spoon or ladle. What you have in the bowl should look like a puree. Return to the pan.
- Add the sugar or date syrup, seasoning, spices and grated garlic if using, then heat the sauce up until the sugar has dissolved.
- Pour into sterilised jars or bottles.
NB: *If you prefer a sweeter sauce you can add more sugar.
*Mix it up by adding different spices to make your own flavour combination.
*Add some freshly grated ginger for an extra fiery kick!
Mangia Bene 