What sea buckthorn tastes like, where it grows wild on Finland's Bothnian Bay coast, when it ripens, why it is picked from thorns, and how Finns drink and cook
Sea buckthorn, orange fire: Tyrni does not grow in the forests of inland Lapland at all. It grows on the stony shores of the Gulf of Bothnia, north as far as the Lapland coast at Tornio, and it is the sourest berry in the Finnish larder and one of its richest in vitamin C. Here is where it lives, what it tastes like and why it is so hard to pick.
Sea buckthorn is the odd one out among Finnish berries: a coastal shrub, a thorn-covered harvest and a flavour so sharp that almost nobody eats it plain.
A shore plant, not a forest one: Wild sea buckthorn grows on the rocky and stony shores of the Gulf of Bothnia, from the Uusikaupunki archipelago north to Tornio, and on the Åland islands. Inland Lapland has none; the coast at Tornio and Kemi is its northern edge.
Sour on purpose: The berries are intensely sour, slightly bitter and faintly oily, with a passion-fruit and apricot note underneath. Finns drink it diluted, sweetened or folded into dessert, rarely by the handful.
Rich in vitamin C: Finnish food-composition data puts sea buckthorn at roughly 100 to 400 milligrams of vitamin C per 100 grams of berries, which is why Finns treat it as their own citrus.
What does sea buckthorn taste like? Sharp. A ripe sea buckthorn berry is as sour as a lemon, with a bitter, slightly oily edge and, once the shock passes, a tropical note somewhere between passion fruit and apricot. The juice is thick and bright orange and stains everything it touches.
That sourness is why the berry is almost never eaten plain. It is diluted into juice, sweetened into jam, frozen into sorbet, or used by chefs the way a lemon is used: a spoon of sea buckthorn cuts through cream, white chocolate, oily fish and rich reindeer.
Frost does not soften it much. The berries taste much the same in October as in September; what changes is how easily they come off the thorny branch, which is the picker's real problem.
Ripe when the coast turns grey. Wild sea buckthorn ripens in September and October, when summer is long gone from the Bothnian coast and the berries are the brightest thing on the shore.
Turning orange: The green berries colour through August. The shrubs, dense and silver-leaved, are easy to spot from the shore path; the fruit is not yet worth the thorns.
Harvest begins: Berries are fully orange, juicy and sour. Growers cut fruiting branches and freeze them so the berries can be shaken off; wild pickers press or pluck them in place, slowly.
Late berries: Ripe berries stay on the branches well into autumn. After the first hard frosts they detach more easily, and some pickers wait for exactly that.
Wild shrubs yes, gardens no. Everyman's right covers wild sea buckthorn like any other wild berry: picking is allowed on uncultivated shore, including private shoreline, as long as you stay clear of houses and yards. Cultivated sea buckthorn on farms and in gardens is off limits.
Two cautions. Do not cut or break branches to get at the berries; that is damaging a plant, which the right does not allow. And wear gloves: the thorns are long, hard and everywhere.
The berry that fights back. Sea buckthorn berries grow packed tight along the branches, each one fixed so firmly that pulling it usually bursts it. Between the berries sit thorns several centimetres long. Picking even a small basket by hand takes patience and thick gloves.
Commercial growers solve it with cold. They cut fruiting branches and freeze them; frozen berries snap off cleanly and go straight to the press. That is also why most sea buckthorn reaches you as juice, purée or jam rather than fresh.
The shrub is dioecious: male and female plants are separate, and only the females fruit, which is why a dense stand on the shore can be half barren.
The upshot for a traveller: fresh sea buckthorn is rare even in Finland, but the juice is in every supermarket.
How Finland uses its sourest berry. Nobody eats a bowl of sea buckthorn. Everybody has had the juice, and almost all of it now comes from cultivated bushes: the Finnish Food Authority's berry-trade report notes that sales of wild sea buckthorn have all but ceased since farming took over.