If you want to add an extra kick of nutrition to your breakfast, you can’t go wrong with adding some berries. Blueberries in particular are rich in antioxidants, and taste great on top of pancakes, yoghurt bowls and in smoothies.
However, eating them can be a bit of a lottery sometimes. Some are perfectly juicy and sweet, whilst others can be very sour to taste. But according to one expert on TikTok, you can be sure your blueberries will taste delicious and ripe if you do follow one food storage hack before eating them.
Cory Rodriguez, also known as Health With Cory on TikTok, is a nutritionist with more than 1.5 million followers on the video-sharing app.
In a bid to make health “easy for everyone”, he often posts simple tricks that anyone can do to make their food more nutritious and tasty.
He recently made a video featuring this very handy blueberry tip, so it’s worth keeping in mind for the next time you bring a punnet home from the supermarket. And all you need is a bowl filled with water.
Taking his box of berries and emptying them into the bowl, Cory said: “If I drop blueberries into water, the ones that are fully ripe and more sweet will sink to the very bottom.
“The ones not as ripe and more tart will float right on top.”
According to the foodie experts at Allrecipes, the reason for this is all to do with the sugar content of blueberries.
Heather Arndt Anderson, author of the book Berries: A Global History, said: “Because of the sugars, a ripe blueberry has a greater specific gravity than water, so a ripe blueberry will sink in water.”
She continued: “[Even] currently a patent for a machine that uses flotation to sort ripe blueberries from unripe, so I think there is some merit to ‘the riper the berry the more it’ll sink’.”
So, if you struggle to determine which of your berries are going to give you the sweetest, juiciest taste, then this trick is well worth a shot.