Salads just aren’t what the used to be, and that’s a good thing. In fact, May is a month dedicated to salads – it’s National Salad Month, a perfect time to take a close look at your big bowl of greens and make sure it represents this brave new world. Today, the best salads are enlivened with colors and tastes that give them a whole new dimension. What was once just a way to get a serving or two is now an integral part of contemporary cuisine.

You know the advantages: salads are filling, fibrous and interesting to eat, and they incorporate a variety of veggies and fruits with such ease that it makes it almost impossible not to eat from the rainbow. And now, something sweet and delicious has become a new salad staple, as much so as a leaf of romaine or a slice of tomato. That something is wild blueberries. They turn up the volume on taste, turn sides into the main event, and provide superior nutrition at the same time.

Using wild is the key: the smaller size of wild blueberries means more berries in every bite for more taste and concentrated antioxidant power (twice the antioxidant capacity of cultivated blueberries). Nature also provided wild blueberries with a unique and delicious variety of sweet and tangy tastes that the larger cultivated berries simply can't match, a real advantage when it comes to salads. They are the choice of chefs and home cooks for their versatility and ease of use as an ingredient in any recipe, especially those that start with a bed of greens. (They also make an incomparable vinaigrette. Keep a carafe in the fridge and serve it up on the fly.)

Ready to see what wild blues can do to take your greens from boring to bodacious? May provides the perfect opportunity for a long overdue journey into a new world of salad. Start tossing!

Wild Picks For Salad Month (or Anytime)

These recipes take salad to the height of taste and creativity, and thanks to frozen, every single one is seasonless – even those that call for fresh. Today’s wild blueberries are frozen within 24 hours of harvest at the peak of taste and nutritional goodness and available in the frozen fruit section of supermarkets across the country year round, making them as nutritious and delicious as those just picked – simply thaw and serve.

Wildly Simple 

• Plating Up, the culinary blog of Maine Food & Lifestyle magazine may call this salad recipe The Blues for its combination of wild blueberries and blue cheese, but it provides nothing but happiness – it’s a perfect example of the superb pairings that can come from wild. 

• Gwenyth Paltrow isn’t just an actress, she’s a foodie of the first order, and in her newsletter goop she points out some of the best in the art of eating, among other things. This Blueberry Salad uses ricotta and cucumber and small, tasty wild blues to achieve minimalist salad perfection. 

Blue Twist on the Traditional 

• You’ll know this Waldorf Salad with Wild Blueberries salad by its celery, lettuce, apples, and walnuts, but its sweet variation is anything but traditional. Wild blues update this simple salad and make it sensational. 

• Caesar Salad with Wild Blueberries is classic, not common. This salad change-up creates the perfect flavor profile with its superfruit enhancement. 

• The Portland Press Herald pulled out all the stops when they highlighted some mouth-watering wild blue recipes from auspicious origins in Tried True and Blue this past month. It includes a blueberry salad from Five Fifty-Five that combines blueberry gastrique, granola crumble, and Champagne-blueberry vinaigrette – a superb salad experience!  

• Warm Asian Beef Salad with Wild Blueberries gives an Eastern twist to greens and puts so-called side dishes to shame.

Indulge In More Blue! WildBlueberries.com has plenty of ideas for using frozen fresh wild blueberries in salads, desserts, drinks and more.

PMA Show is a Tribute to Harvesting Traditions 

The images are rendered in black and white, a medium that illustrates the rough-hewn world of field labor. The subjects are workers and their families who formed the Wild Blueberry raking crews. They are engaged in work and rest, framed by the foggy hills or by a field strewn with crates, or engaged in a candid moment that represents the hours spent during Wild Blueberry harvest season making a living off of the land.

David Brooks Stess Caledonia, circa 2000 gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches Courtesy of VoxPhotographs, © David Brooks Stess

Blueberry Rakers: Photographs by David Brooks Stess is part of the Portland Museum of Art’s Circa series, which features the work of contemporary artists from Maine and beyond, and Stess’ photography, on display at the museum through May 19, features rakers on Maine Wild Blueberry fields during harvest. It is an affecting documentation of an important part of the state’s agricultural history, and ultimately, a fitting tribute to the Wild Blueberry.

The show features more than 50 gelatin silver prints which the Portland Museum of Art describes this way:
Stess has captured the physical aspects of their labor, as well as their social life in workers' camps on the edge of the fields. By focusing his camera on the hard realities of manual labor and the relationships among the workers, Stess brings an unsentimental view to his subject.

Stess, 51, whose work has appeared throughout Maine galleries since 1995, captured images of rakers during the 20-plus year span when he served as a raker himself. Raking the naturally occurring low bush Wild Blueberry fields of Maine, Eastern Canada and Quebec was once the best way to harvest the small Wild Blueberry. And, nature has given our Wild Blueberries some unique and special attributes that make them superior to the larger cultivated blueberry that are planted and farmed all over the world. The Wild Blueberry has double the antioxidants and a delicious and complex taste that combines sweet and tangy flavors.

An Artist’s Passion for the Wild Blueberry

Stess is not shy about showing his true blue colors when it comes to the Wild Blueberry. In an article in the Portland Press Herald, he exclaimed that cultivated blueberries hardly hold a candle to the taste of wild (read about Stess’ passion for wild in Meredith Goad’s enjoyable interview, Soup to Nuts: Black-and-white and Blueberries) He also shared with Goad a genuine awe over “berry colors that vary from albino to black to different shades of red and blue”. He explains how the Wild Blueberry possesses its own “terrior” and expresses his enthusiasm for the variety of clones found in the fields, one of the unique characteristics of the Wild Blueberry (these naturally occurring varietal clones give Wild Blueberries their unique, complex flavors). And, as a fanatical pie baker and experienced farmer’s market vendor, Stess expressed the enjoyment he feels when he helps others see the connection between food and its origins.

Because the Wild Blueberry – a beloved part of the state’s culture – is central to Stess’ work, interest is high, and the exhibit set off something of a Wild Blueberry fête at PMA. The museum has included favorite recipe packets from well-known area chefs and classic institutions like Helen’s restaurant in Machias along with the show’s posters from the museum store. And for after the show, the café serves blueberry-themed items to complete the experience. And by all means, if you miss harvest season, don’t despair because 99% of the Wild Blueberry crop is typically quick frozen within 24 hours of being harvested and available in the frozen fruit section of supermarkets across the country year round.

History of Raking 

Stess’ work is described as giving “a face and a context” to the iconic Wild Blueberry that is at the center of the Maine’s agriculture. His images depict the non-mechanized harvest of the fields. Hand raking, the traditional method of harvesting Wild Blueberries, began in 1910 when hundreds of laborers would come North to work fields with hand-held rakes designed to clean the plants of their fruit.

David Brooks Stess Norman, circa 2002 gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches Courtesy of VoxPhotographs,  © David Brooks Stess

Some small or family farms in Maine and Eastern Canada have preserved their hand-raking traditions. Members of the local community and some migrant workers still clean the fields by hand, and are paid for what they rake, often making hundreds of dollars a day on productive grounds. But hand raking represents a dwindling percentage of the millions of pounds of Wild Blueberries that are harvested today. Now, capturing Wild Blueberries at the height of taste and nutrition requires a combination of traditional and high-tech methods, and most large farms have turned to mechanized harvesting to harvest most of their land.

The integration of technology in this century-old harvesting process ensures only ripe tasty Wild Blueberries end up in the  frozen bag when it gets to us. Harvesting by machine is a technologically advanced process, with harvest and cleaning equipment controlled by onboard computers. Using machines to harvest the land is efficient and can also mean less damage to the crop. It also allows growers to mow the grounds, a more environmentally sound practice than the traditional burning, and lessens farmers’ dependence on hand labor, which is increasingly difficult to find.

While the face of harvesting continues to change, many Wild Blueberry farms (Welch Farm in Roque Bluffs, for example) provide summertime tours that expose visitors to the “lost art of raking” – that sweeping of the field with the hand held rake to fill buckets to be carried to the winnowing machine for cleaning and then loaded into boxes – just as Stess’ photographs portray.

Nothing less than a rakeful of appreciation goes out to David Brooks Stess for sharing his passion for this special berry, and making the wild blueberry’s story part of his artistic vision. You can learn more about Blueberry Rakers: Photographs by David Brooks Stess at the Portland Museum of Art. You can also find out more about the history and traditions of the wild blueberry harvest at WildBlueberries.com.

The Harvest is Months Away, But Growers Are Thinking Blue

Each year when winter is slowly replaced by high sun and rising temperatures, our thoughts naturally turn to planting. It means spring is on the way, and the time for taking advantage of the earth’s bounties is close at hand.
This year, wild blueberry plants have endured another harsh winter, but that’s part of their wild nature: they are naturally resilient to challenging winters in the Northeast. They have evolved to grow in acidic soil, thrive through wildly changing temperatures, and use their natural UV protection to survive unshielded in summer sun. In fact, these environmental challenges make them uniquely powerful when it comes to the phytonutrients they produce to protect themselves. Scientists believe that resilience may translate into superb disease prevention and aging protection when we eat them – that’s the unique power of wild.

• Antioxidant capacity. Wild Blueberries are being studied for their powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that may help protect against diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.
• Genetic diversity. Wilds consist of hundreds of different naturally occurring varietal clones – a mix that provides the intense, complex flavors that range from sweet to tart. 
• Smaller size means higher skin-to-pulp ratio. Because of their size, foods that contain wild blueberries have more berries in every bite. That translates to more taste, more nutrition and more antioxidants.