Two weeks ago I had a post about rose hips from Rosa rugosa (click here to read the original post), and discussed that they were a readily available wild edible, and a great source for vitamin C. I’d tasted the fruit in the past and really liked the taste, but I have been generally dissuaded from eating them more often due to the tediousness of picking out the seeds and scraping the small bit of flesh off the inside of the rose hip’s skin.

Having bought a food mill recently, I wanted to try another tactic. A food mill is a kitchen tool used to mash and sieve soft food, and it is excellent at removing unwanted parts of fruit, such as tough skin and seeds. So, when I came across a substantial quantity of rose hips while walking along a beach in Mashpee this past weekend, I took the opportunity to try a more efficient way to eat them.

I managed to collect a bag of rose hip fruits (above). The fruits are ripe when they’re bright red. Some of them were starting to soften and wrinkle, but as long as they were intact and not starting to rot or dry out, I picked those as well.

As you can see from the halved rose hip in the picture above, the majority of the fruit’s volume is seed. I was uncertain how well the food mill would be able to separate the fruits, so I cut them all in half before processing, although in retrospect I think that was an unnecessary step. I also heated the halved fruits in a sauce pan with a small amount of water for a few minutes to soften them before running them through the food mill, which was an important step.

The pictures below show the basic process. The softened fruits are placed in the food mill. As the crank is turned, it separates the pulp from the seeds and fibrous skin. The latter remain in the upper part of the food mill, while the mashed, de-seeded pulp is pushed through to the bowl below. Unfortunately, due to the disproportionate volume of the skin and seeds, my seemingly large bag of rose hips produced only about 1 cup of pulp. (Note to self: pick more rose hips next time.) I added this 1 cup of rose hip pulp to ¾ of a cup of sugar and a small amount of water and heated it again in saucepan for 5-10 minutes. The resulting “jam” was just enough to fill two small jars.

I’m pretty happy with the flavor (it was an excellent spread on English muffins the next morning), but it came out much thicker than I’d hoped. The next time I try this, I plan to add some additional water to the initial steps with the hope of producing a thinner pulp.