If you happened to see our donation statistics page recently, you might have noticed the appearance of the muscadine. And you might be wondering just what it is. I was recently talking to a friend of mine about muscadines and scuppernongs and she thought I was quoting a Dr. Seuss book.
Now is the time to learn about muscadines, because they’re in season, they’re native to the southeast, and they’re fully delicious. So all the more reason to satisfy that southern pride and your belly in one fell swoop.
Muscadines are relatives of the grape, but with a thicker skin, and usually with several seeds in the center. They have a taste similar to a grape, but there’s no confusing the two. Many suck out the tasty middle of the muscadine and discard the sour skin, but I like to eat it all. I swear that muscadines taste like the artificial grape flavor found in a lot of Japanese candies, but others have been slow to agree with me on this point, so perhaps it’s something you just have to experience for yourself. There is also significant back and forth discussion concerning the amount of the resveratrol meganutrient found in muscadines. You should probably be on the safe side and eat lots of muscadines.
As far as finding muscadines, we’re starting to get a few points labeled on the food map, but you’ll also be able to find some on your own no problem. The difficulty with finding muscadines is that, being native to the southeast, they grow absolutely everywhere, but only a few vines actually fruit, and then of those vines, even fewer actually fruit to the point of it being worthwhile collect them.
One thing to know about muscadines is that they like to grow at the edges of wooded areas. Living in the beautiful, lush city that we do, we have a lot of roads cutting through wooded areas, one of the easiest ways to spot muscadines is just to watch the ground. You will eventually come across a scene like the one below, spotted from a moving vehicle near Briarcliff and Clairmont:
Fortunately, muscadines’ thick skin means that they usually suffer no damage (despite having fallen 20+ feet in the case of this particular picture) and you can successfully harvest lots of pristine groundling muscadines.
Tags: muscadine, sideoftheroad
