Strawberry Juice: Taste, Ingredients and Where the Strawberry Came From

Our strawberry juice brings together two seasons: June strawberries and autumn apples from our orchard. A 3 L box holds 10% strawberry juice and 90% apple juice, both not-from-concentrate (NFC). It tastes light and berry-like, with the aroma of ripe strawberries; it’s a good fit for a children’s table, and it’s also used to make lemonades, smoothies and desserts. The garden strawberry itself is a relatively young berry: it appeared in Europe only in the 18th century, from two American wild strawberries.

Contents

• The taste of strawberry juice: mellow, with a caramel note
• Polunytsia or sunytsia: where these names come from
• Where the garden strawberry came from
• Ingredients and nutritional value
• Two seasons in one box: how we make strawberry juice
• Strawberry lemonade, smoothie and tiramisu
• Frequently asked questions

The taste of strawberry juice: mellow, with a caramel note

Here the strawberry comes through mainly in the aroma, while the taste stays mellow: the apple base freshens the berry’s sweetness. The faint caramel note comes from furaneol, one of the key compounds in strawberry aroma.

Polunytsia or sunytsia: where these names come from

Both words are correct, but they refer to different berries: Ukrainians call the small woodland berries “sunytsia” and the large garden ones, like those in our juice, “polunytsia.” In botany, though, the garden polunytsia is “sunytsia sadova,” the garden sunytsia.

“Sunytsia” is an old Proto-Slavic word. Linguists derive it from “nyknuty,” to droop: sunytsia is the berry that droops toward the ground. For the same reason, in dialects it was called “pozomka” or “zemlianka,” both from the word for “ground,” and Poles still say poziomka. In Hrinchenko’s Dictionary (1907–1909), however, “polunytsia” is not yet the garden berry but the wild green strawberry. The origin of this word is not known for certain: etymologists suggest a link with the verb “palenity,” to turn bright red.

Neither garden nor wild strawberries are berries in the botanical sense. The juicy red flesh is an enlarged receptacle, and the true fruits are the tiny “seeds” on the surface, little nutlets called achenes. An average strawberry has about two hundred of them.

Where the garden strawberry came from

The Virginia strawberry from North America reached Europe as early as the beginning of the 17th century: its berries are small but very fragrant. The large-berried Chilean strawberry was brought to France in 1714 by the engineer and spy Amédée-François Frézier. Only five of his little plants survived the long sea voyage.

Around 1750, descendants of those plants were already being grown in Brittany next to the Virginia strawberry. And the fact that the new large, fragrant berry was a hybrid of the Chilean and Virginia strawberries was explained by the French botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne in a book published in 1766. The author was not yet twenty at the time.

Researchers who studied the strawberry genome sum up its history this way: we owe the modern strawberry to the Mapuche people of South America, who domesticated the Chilean strawberry, to a French spy and seafarer, and to a young plant enthusiast.

Ingredients and nutritional value

There are two ingredients in fresh-pressed apple-strawberry juice: direct-pressed apple juice (90%) and strawberry juice (10%).

Two seasons in one box: how we make strawberry juice

The apples for the juice grow in our orchard. Once picked, strawberries don’t ripen any further — unlike pears — so they gain their aroma and sweetness only on the plant. We press them ourselves, separately from the apples, in June, and the strawberry juice waits for autumn. When the apples ripen, we blend it with their juice and pasteurize everything before packaging.

Strawberry lemonade, smoothie and tiramisu

1. Strawberry lemonade with basil

In a tall glass, lightly crush 3–4 basil leaves with a spoon to release their scent. Add ice and a slice of lemon, pour in half a glass of juice and top up with sparkling water.

2. Strawberry smoothie

Blend 200 ml of juice, a handful (about 100 g) of frozen strawberries and 3–4 tablespoons of plain yogurt. The frozen berries will make the smoothie cold and silky. For an autumn version, there’s a pumpkin smoothie with banana.

3. Strawberry tiramisu

For a 20×20 cm dish, you’ll need about 200 g of savoiardi ladyfingers, 250 g of mascarpone, 200 ml of 33% cream, 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar, a glass of juice and a handful of strawberries. Whip the mascarpone with the cream and powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Dip each ladyfinger in the juice for 1–2 seconds and lay them out in a layer; top with half of the cream, then another layer of ladyfingers and the rest of the cream. Decorate with sliced strawberries and let the dessert chill for 4–6 hours.

June strawberries on a base of apples from our orchard: a mellow berry flavor that makes a great strawberry tiramisu.

You can order fresh-pressed apple-strawberry juice, 3 L, on our website. The minimum order is two boxes, and you can mix flavors; all our juices are in the “Juices” section. We ship within 1–2 business days via Nova Poshta and Ukrposhta across Ukraine. How we make our juices is covered in “Fresh Apple Juice: How We Make It”; how to open the box and how long it keeps, in “Juice in a Bag-in-Box with a Tap”.
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