Food Skills Spotlight: Drupefruit

Meet Drupefruit, a local business bringing the beauty of the shrub (the drink, not the plant) to SLC. Plus, plant starter sales and shares, Earthie Crunchie compost, and more news and opps.

This spring we welcome not only the return of warm weather and fresh veggies, but the beginning of our new Food Skill workshop series. With classes from local makers, doers, and businesses, we hope to provide opportunities for our community to reconnect to how and what we eat. Our second guest of the season is Drupefruit, a local business that transforms fruits into refreshingly tart preserved syrups called shrubs. We talked with them about what shrubs are, why they’re good to have around, and how we can expand our thinking about what food can become when mixed with a little vinegar.

“Shrubs are super ancient,” says Drupefruit owner Brooke Marple. “‘Shrub’ comes from the word “sharāb” [taken from the Arabic word for “to drink”] and they dropped off in popularity when refrigeration was invented, because you don’t need refrigeration for shrubs. The vinegar is the natural preservative.” But what do shrubs preserve? Fruit, primarily. Combined with vinegar and sugar and left for some time, the resulting shrub is a lip smacking, flavor-infused syrup that was a colonial American favorite (mixed with water, soda water, or alcohol). Thanks to vinegar’s thirst-quenching chemistry and its ability to mask impurities in water or alcohol, shrubs in some form or another date back centuries. 

Shrubs are getting popular again, though, finding success in the craft cocktail scene over the last ten years. Marple knows this, but it’s not what brought her to shrubs. She fell in love with shrubs as a non-alcoholic beverage option presented to her by friends in Seattle and Oakland, and over the pandemic, decided to start a fresh, new-to-Utah business starring the drink. Drupefruit shrubs are meant to introduce a healthy and delicious ingredient into people’s lives, but Marple’s product also has the potential to open minds to the possibilities of preserving fruit, and making something wonderful out of essentially scraps.  “Learning that white vinegar, red wine vinegar, champagne vinegar [are] just further fermentations of an alcoholic product… it’s kind of a metaphor for vinegar as an evolution past alcohol, and it’s better for you.” 

Drupefruit uses raw organic apple cider vinegar with the mother, which is the gooey-looking film of acetic acid bacteria and cellulose that forms during the fermentation of vinegar—a probiotic element. Vinegar also has some proven and some anecdotal evidence to show that it can help with blood sugar regulation, gut health and immunity. “I know a lot of people that dilute ACV or just take a shot of it and I don’t believe in just like choking any food down. I think all of your food and nutrition should be mentally and spiritually uplifting as well, and having a product that  … you don't have the bad association to is a healthier approach to your health.”

“If you use quality ingredients, the flavor is amazing,” says Marple. Her lineup of shrubs certainly are. Drupefruit infuses a fantastical mix of flavors into the ACV-based shrubs: there’s mango, hibiscus, habanero sweetened with maple syrup; ginger, coconut, orange blossom sweetened with agave; peach, tomato, basil, balsamic; and cherry, lemon, lavender. And after a winter of vending these permanent flavors, the warm weather is now bringing local fruit back into the mix, so you can look out for new flavors soon. 

At the upcoming skillshare, you can learn how to make your own, too. “I’m going to give [people] the general idea of how to make a shrub so that if they’ve got a garden—they’ve got extra produce they want to use—they can make one for themselves and figure out the magic and the beauty of it,” she says. “I want to have the mentality that this is not a secret that I’m keeping to myself, I want to share it, and be open with the community about the ingredients I use and techniques.” Among the tips and tricks may be pointers on how to use the excess pickled fruit that comes from making the shrub, plus more knowledge about different vinegars and their uses and benefits. 

This free Food Skills workshop is a partnership with Animalia (where you can find Drupefruit stocked) next week on Tuesday, May 3rd at Central Ninth Market at 6 p.m. (where you can also find Drupefruit stocked). You can sign up here to be on our waitlist for the event, which is at this time already full. Drupefruit products can also be found at Boozetique, or online at drupefru.it. Find more ideas for how to use shrubs (salad dressings, stock additives, baking) at @drupefru.it on Instagram.

Peach, tomato, basil, and balsamic Drupefruit Shrub mixed shamelessly with a pale ale, something like a simplified michelada, perfect for a lazy day off. Next to it, a mini bottle of strawberry, borage, and rose shrub—the hairy-stemmed borage is a flowering plant used to attract pollinators in gardens and to ward off pests, but it finds a lovely home when put to edible use in Drupefruit shrubs. Photo from Erin Moore.

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Notes:

It’s growing time!

Growers probably don’t need to be told to get excited, because they’re probably already digging into their garden beds, whether it’s for the first time or in preparation for another year of seasoned gardening. Wasatch Community Gardens is advertising their Spring Plant Sale which is coming up on Saturday, May 7. It starts at 8 a.m. at Rowland Hall (720 Guardsman Way) and goes til 2 p.m., with a startling 40,000 plant starts available for purchase. 

If you want to go the free route, head over to everyone’s favorite vegan Vietnamese joint, All Chay, to put in an order for starts from the annual Dirt2Table plant share. If for some reason you aren’t craving an Ocean Love bowl, you can order directly from Dirt2Table here, for pickup in May. 

You can also check out the Salt Lake City Public Library’s Seed Library, where you can “check out” seeds to grow in your own garden, or if you’re one of the lucky lottery winners farming in the library’s own community plots this summer. They only ask that after you’ve successfully grown some plants of your own that you return some seeds back to the library to keep the free seed exchange going for future gardeners. 

And if you want to help out some growers, you can team up with a farmer through New Roots SLC’s Barter With a Farmer program. Volunteers can submit their schedule and get paired up with a farmer with a corresponding one. In exchange for labor, volunteers can look forward to taking home some veggies.

Utah’s First Fungi Festival is here

As local mushroom fans keep saying, the fungal awakening is happening. As in, there are a lot of people becoming interested in mushrooms lately. Whether you’re a new member of the Mushroom Society of Utah, just picked up a grow kit from Fungal Focus, or already a longtime forager, grower, or culinary fan, you’re probably already aware of the first Utah Fungi Festival. On the weekend of May 13th through the 15th, attendees of the fest can enjoy panels from fungi experts, a screening on psychedelic medicine, and a foray with other “fungi fanatics.”

Some last bits 

In our last newsletter we talked about ways to cut food waste, and didn’t shout out Earthie Crunchie, SLC’s cutest-named compost resource. We’re sorry about that! Not only do they offer compost pickup programs in multiple tiers of frequency and household size, but they offer pickup for glass, snack wrappers, chopsticks, and plastic bags. The best part? It’s apartment-dweller friendly. 

And another new and fun bit of news: you can also look for Drupefruit shrubs at SLC’s buzziest new cafe-slash-bar situation, Curiosity. It’s buzzy because it’s an alcohol-free cocktail bar (we’re calling mocktails zero proof cocktails now) and late night coffee bar and bottle shop. The cafe is following a new trend of booze-free drinking that is still interesting, glamorous, and fun. Drupefruit’s zingy shrubs will undoubtedly fit right into this exciting new crowd of bevs. 

That’s all for now, thanks so much for reading. If you found these resources helpful, or our spotlight illuminating, share with your friends, co-workers, or neighbors. Happy planting season!