Aronia (Chokeberry)

Aronia melanocarpa · Temperate fruit

40 pairings

Aronia, or black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa), is a small, glossy blue-black pome-berry of a hardy North American shrub, famous for a flavour so mouth-drying and astringent it makes you "choke" — a fierce, dark, wine-like sourness backed by tannin and one of the highest antioxidant loads of any temperate fruit. Almost never eaten raw by the handful, it is a modern juice, extract and "superfood" crop.

Picking a good onedrag

UnderripeOverripe

Black and firmColoured through and still firm, short on sugar. Send this one to juice, jam or the fermenter, where sugar and heat do the work the fruit hasn't.Sound, but early

Skin and cut fleshBlue-black outside, the cut face staining dark

The squeezeFirm and springy — the thumb leaves no mark

A crushed berryA faint dark-berry note over a green, herbal edge

Reading a just ripe one. Move the slider and the rest of this page — nutrition, pairings — re-scores with it.

Preparing