Strawberry Leaf

Last year (2015) I took all the strawberry leaves from my backyard, wrapped them in tinfoil pouches, and baked them until they were dark brown. I blitzed them up in a robo-coupe and jarred it. Those ‘strawberry ashes’ have a unique aroma, one I found was very similar to the Japanese post-fermented tea on our tea list at Q. I still have plenty of ashes, but rather than throw away all of our leaves this year, I dried them in our spare bathtub in the basement. Once they were dried I had a big decision to make — what the fuck am I going to do with a bathtub full of dried leaves?

I decided that if I was going to anything constructive I would need to sort them out. Strawberry plants have a lot of shoots, I had to remove those first. I ended up with 2 shopping bags full of leaves after about 3 hours. The following several days were that of “why am I doing this?” and procrastinating to advance the plan. Now that the shoots were removed, it was time to sort the leaves by color. Careful examination of the leaves led me to believe I have a fungus attacking my strawberries, which after a quick google search revealed it’s quite simply called ‘black spot fungus’ which is seemingly harmless to ingest (possible future endeavor) but I’m still uncomfortable with eating it.

In the beginning, the sorting was very basic. Green leaves vs other (yellow, etc) while at the same time removing the spots infected with the black spot fungus (which I have nicknamed blight)
The following days went through a more rigorous sorting process by leaf color and I ended up with the following:

Red
70:30 Red:Green
70:30 Green:Red
Green
Green, Yellow, Orange, Red
Yellow
‘Nectarine’ Yellow, Orange, Red

Now that I have all of the leaves sorted and in mason jars, I will allow them a few days to settle in with their brothers and sisters before beginning the next phase.
I don’t know what the next phase is, but it’s likely to be an analysis of the aromas they produce which will definitely be distinct, followed by infusing them with hot water like tea to see the flavors, and finally grinding them to powder to see if the color of the leaf will remain or how much will turn to brown.

My hypothesis is that yellow leaves will smell and taste ‘the best’, let’s see! I’ve invested 10+ hours in this so far, and all I’ve got is this mundane blog post!