Wild raspberry in 72% plain chocolate

Wild raspberry

Rubus idaeus

one of the many joys of living in this part of Perthshire is the abundance of wild raspberries in the area - every hedgerow, field margin, bit of unused land is thick with them - often growing with their favourite chums, nettles and cleavers which makes picking them seem a bit of a battle!  The flavour of these small soft fruits is magnificent, and although this part of the world is famed for its cultivated raspberries - it is the wild ones that reign supreme in flavour.   They need to be processed as soon as they are picked otherwise they start to mould and dissolve into themselves - many an hour of picking has been wasted when I foolishly thought I would 'leave them till tomorrow';

We use the berries in a number of ways - pulp them to make leathers (the absolute BEST of the leathers to my taste), we semi-dry them to rehydrate in cream for a dark chocolate ganache, we juice them for caramels, and we pulp and dry them for grinding into chocolate.  I have thought about trying to make pate de fruit with them, but for me, the process requires too much boiling which dulls their flavour; the leather-making process is less intensive and I prefer to process them into leathers to retain that fresh rich flavour.

The chocolate we have matched it with is a 72% Venezuela plain chocolate made by Duffy's Chocolate, probably my all time flavourite chocolate.

Ingredients: Cocoa solids 66.5% minimum: cocoa beans, cane sugar, cocoa butter, dried raspberries (8%), emulsifier: SUNFLOWER lecithin

Net wt: 50g