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Rose Hips—Jazz Up Your Jelly in the Fall
Plants & Gardens News Volume 15, Number 3 | Fall 2000
by Joelen Adams
As the last roses bloom in my garden each fall, I look forward to a bountiful crop of rose hips. These shapely, colorful hips are the seed-bearing fruits of rose plants, and it's no secret that they are edible.
We humans have been munching on rose hips—and petals—for millennia. In ancient Rome, hips were used as a flavoring for candy, among other things. Nowadays, we mainly dry them for tea or boil them for preserves.
When I was a little girl, my grandmother taught me how to make a delicious green apple jelly from scratch. She then taught me how, in the fall, I could add an extra special twist to the jelly using fresh rose hips. It's a perfect combination. After all, roses and apples are botanical cousins. I like to think of hips as miniature "rose apples."
Not all rose hips are palatable, however. Some are too small and hard—just skin and pips, with very little flesh. Generally, the plumper the hips, the better. The best and biggest hips in my yard are on 'Altissimo' (a climber) and 'Hansa' (one of the rugosas).
In his book Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants, Steve Brill likens the flavor of rose hips to apricot and their texture to persimmon. He eats his rose hips raw (minus the seeds, which are very bitter). He also cooks them in fruit juice, strains and purees them, and uses the resulting sauce in everything from cookies to fruit soup.
Rose hips are very nutritious, providing high doses of vitamin C and bioflavonoids. They are also a source of vitamins A, E, and B-1, as well as potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and iron.
All rose hips start out hard and green at first and, as they ripen, soften and change color. You'll know that they're ready for eating when their sides "give" slightly under gentle pressure.
So, if I've managed to pique your interest in rose cuisine, here are some general instructions for harvesting and preparing rose hips fresh from the garden:
- For lots of hips come fall, stop deadheading your roses in August.
- Be sure to only use hips from roses that haven't been sprayed with insecticide or dusted with sulfur.
- Hips are often tastiest if left on the bush until after first frost. However, if the color is right, and they feel ripe, you can pick them.
- Wash the hips and trim off the blossom and stem ends with scissors.
- Cut in half lengthwise and remove the tiny hairs and the seeds from the center. There's no need to do this if you're just making jelly because the seeds will be strained off anyway.
- Don't use aluminum utensils or pans as they can destroy the vitamin C.
Online Recipes
To learn more about making fun foods from rose hips, visit the home pages of the American Rose Society. Also check out Just Roses, the wonderfully informative web site of the late Mark Whitelaw.
Jolene Adams began what has been a lifelong fascination with roses at an early age, while helping her mother in the garden (at least, it seemed like "helping" at the time). Later on, when her own children were growing up, she taught 4-H and Girl Scout classes how to make candies, jellies, cookies, and cakes, often using roses as key ingredients. Nowadays, as an American Rose Society (ARS) accredited Rose Horticulture Judge and Consulting Rosarian, Jolene travels and lectures on roses to a wide variety of audiences. She also manages the web site of the ARS and is involved in several local rose societies in the San Francisco Bay Area.