I was once fortunate enough to live close to a strawberry farm, and I’d always get excited to drive past it on my way to and from work. Every day, I’d roll down the windows and take in that sweet, almost candy-like smell that was so strong it filled the whole area, including my car. You already know what those berries tasted like just by smelling them. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to resist and I’d stop to pick up a pint or five: I mean how do you not?
Most strawberries you find in stores don’t have those big smells and flavors. Those berries were picked before they were fully ripened, packed in a cold warehouse, and shipped to every corner of the country. That’s why you get those red-on-the-outside, white-on-the-inside berries without those robust strawberry esters you’d get from the plant-ripened fruit.
Strawberries are like tomatoes for me; I just won’t eat them year round. I’ll happily wait for them to come into season, then I gorge like a brown bear eating salmon before hibernation. I do the ingredient-sourcing for the Bon Appétit test kitchen and have bought these “normal” strawberries from stores for the sake of recipe testing. Almost every time someone will say, “Just imagine how much better this dish would be with in-season berries.”
Which brings me to Harry’s Berries, a family-owned farm started by Harry Iwamoto in Oxnard, California in 1967. Harry came from a line of family farmers going back generations in Japan. When they first started growing strawberries, they sold them at roadside farm stands and to wholesalers. Now Harry's daughter, Molly, runs the business along with her husband. The farm moved to a new location but continued growing great fruit.
One thing that makes Harry's Berries so great is that they're harvested by hand when they're perfectly ripe. (Most berry brands don't do this because ripe fruit doesn't last long on shelves. Harry's don't last long anyway—because people like me buy them out.) Compare them to a quart of supermarket berry brands and you’ll never go back. Their taste matches their smell, and the fruit is red all the way through—no tough spongy centers. The benefits of letting produce finish on their plant, in its natural environment, is undeniable.
Unless you're buying strawberries from a local farmers' market when they're in season, you can’t really do better than Harry’s. (Even Martha will back me up.) Eating them always brings me right back to driving past farms with the windows down.
You can find Harry's Berries at farmers' markets throughout California and, for a short window of time, in other parts of the country. Check delivery services like FreshDirect and specialty markets like Baldor.