I love the information and ingenuity of this gal. Not only does she share some huckleberry preserving methods, she talks about two huckleberry rakes she made.
After all was said and done, she ended up buying one of our rakes (NOTE: She mentioned that she bought her rake from Amazon. Because we were shorted rakes this season, we did not offer them on Amazon. You can still buy them on our Huckleberry Rake website!)
Day 226: Do-it-yourself Huckleberry Rake
…Northwest tribal folk dried huckleberries in large cakes and stacked the cakes until ready to use. I picture great purple wheels, like towers of cheese, stacked to the ceiling in corners of longhouses. When berries where needed, a chunk of a wheel was broken off and reconstituted in water. I’ve also seen recommendations for mashing the berries and spreading them out across a screen to dry in the sun. When the mash is dry, it can be crumbled and sealed in storage containers. I’ll try this option, as I don’t have a free corner to stack cakes of berries. My least favorite preservation discovery is to store the berries in bacon grease or used cooking oil. Yuck! Now that just sounds nasty, but not when considering the huckleberry’s traditional use as fish bait. I never really thought of the huckleberry as fish bait, but it makes perfect sense. It’s the exact right bite for a #8 trout hook. …
Huckleberry Rakes can also be found on our Tastes of Idaho site where we still have a few “Child’s” Huckleberry Rakes as well as the standard Huckleberry Rake (pictured above) available!