For the past eight years, I've been on a mission
to document every fruit in the world. This is an impossible task that has so far brought me to 25
countries and over these years I have found things that I never could have imagined. Fruit that tastes like peanut butter, pickles, sour cream.... *sighs* vomit. I have found fruit that you can clean your
clothes with, fruit that makes sour food taste sweet and along the way i've gotten to learn about
the history of these fruits and the cultures that use them however I have run into a problem. Each year it gets harder and harder for me to find new species to scratch off my list. This is not because I'm running out of fruit to find. There are tens of thousands of edible fruit species out there
in the world. The problem is... well a few things: First, fruit can be very difficult to grow. It might only grow in a very specific environment, it can take years for a plant to produce fruit and even then I have to find it when it is in season, when it's ripe and it's available. Second, fruit can be very perishable sometimes so much so that you have to eat it the moment
that you pick it off the plant. And finally, the commercial fruit industry favors produce that
lasts longer, looks prettier and is more well known. Markets worldwide are getting less diverse by
the day and land that may have once produced an uncommon fruit is quickly getting torn down
and replaced with crops that earn more money. Cloudberries are the truffle of the fruit world. They are notorious for being one of the most elusive fruits to find. They check all three boxes. They are mind-numbingly difficult to grow, extremely perishable, and, although products using cloudberries are popular in some parts of the world, the fresh berries are way too much trouble for any produce company to even think about trying to sell. Difficult as I knew it would be I was determined. I had to try cloudberries no matter what it would take. To do this I figured the best way was to pinpoint where on the entire earth I would have the most success in finding them. I live in New York City and amazingly I've read reports of people finding cloudberries as close by as long island only a few miles away from where I live. But there they are so rare and so not well known, that I knew that I would never find them. Cloudberries do have some popularity elsewhere in North America. You can find them in Alaska and in Newfoundland. In newfoundland they are called "bakeapples" and there is even a bakeapple festival every year. This was probably the most convenient place to find cloudberries but it wasn't where I had the best odds of finding them. That was in Europe. Cloudberries are most prevalent in Northern Europe especially in the Nordic countries of Norway Sweden and Finland. There is a long history of the berry being used in this part of the world. In Norway, the municipality of Nesseby has a coat
of arms and a flag with the cloudberry on it. That's a good sign. In Sweden, cloudberry products are very popular. You can even find cloudberry jam at IKEA. But as I searched online for the best possible place to go to find cloudberries, Finland consistently came up ahead of the others. So I booked a flight to Helsinki. Cloudberries can be found throughout Finland. However Helsinki is not a good place to find them growing. But it is the largest and most visited city in Finland, so I figured that the main market might be a good place to find vendors that have traveled from other regions. There's some sort of today show being filmed and as you can see of course they are
sitting there with a big bowl of strawberries. So this is the central market from afar and as you can see there's tents with orange tops and tents with white tops. The white ones those are just souvenir stands with people selling reindeer paraphernalia and the orange ones there.. That is all farmers markets. People keep taking photos in front of these projectile-vomiting sealions. That is not why I'm here. I'm here for this I did find cloudberries! But they looked really really sad. I knew that cloudberries were perishable.. but this was a lot worse than I thought. I was tempted to plunk down 32 euro/kilo for a small Tupperware full of mush. But it didn't feel right. I wanted my first taste of fresh cloudberries to be perfect. So I decided to wait Going to Finland wasn't enough. I had to go to the best part of Finland to find cloudberries and that part is Lapland. This area makes up the northernmost third of the country. We flew into the largest city of Lapland, Rovaniemi A city that lies at the border with the arctic circle. This place is popular with tourists because it's also touted
as where Santa Claus lives. "Hello my dear friends My name is Joulupukki but I'm also known as Santa Claus, Babbo Natale, sheng dan lao ren, Pere Noel and so on. Let me tell you about my hometown of Rovaniemi." Kids can come and meet Santa any time of year and there's even a post office box where letters to Santa do get answered. I can imagine that during its peak season (during the winter) it would be exploding with families searching for a vacation that's fit for the cover of a holiday card. For a scrooge like me though... I was glad that I visited during the summer when the area receives almost no tourism. Still lapland enchanted me. It's very sparsely populated with less than five people per square mile. There's only one main road that stretches from north to south, passing through an endless forest with occasional tiny
villages along the way. A road that was, for the majority of our trip, completely empty save for the occasional herd of reindeer. Those are little cloudberries... This is worth stopping at God...that statue freaked me out. We found a random roadside attraction very terrifying little santas
and elves and mushrooms and of course the cloudberry. Lapland is so close to the
top of the earth that when we were there the sun never set. At night it just sat in the sky like a paused sunset Even during the summer, there's a feeling of winter in the air. It was a fitting place to find such a magical little berry Our first stop in Lapland was the Rovaniemi central market. As you can see there's not a whole lot of action going on. The cloudberries are slightly more fresh than the ones that are in Helsinki but not by much. They're still a little waterlogged looking. So we're going to keep looking elsewhere. We're going to a cloudberry festival.. so that's going to be probably the ideal place to look. But here it's kind of desolate. It's not a main day it's a weekday and it shows. There's not a whole lot here. although the market wasn't great, I did find a restaurant that was serving a traditional Finnish specialty involving cloudberry jam. I'm keeping my voice down because it is extremely quiet in here What I have right here is Juustoleipa. "Bread cheese" is what that translates to. They bake it and then they use it as a vehicle for jam So it's treated kind of like a bread. And one of the jams
that's most commonly served with is cloudberry jam hmm that's very good and the cheese squeaks when you eat it. It's got a nice chew to it and it pairs really well with the berries. It's like if you took a bunch of different berries like strawberry and raspberry but also a bit of apricot and peach and a little bit of like a savory note as well it does lend itself pretty well for like a savory sort of dish so having this contrast with cheese that has a
little sharpness to it.. it works. It works really well So here's another specialty that they do here. They take the juustoleipa cheese and they'll melt it into coffee. Originally this was done with reindeer cheese but it's very tricky to get reindeer cheese now. I don't think it's usually available anywhere. But you put it in and you let it slowly melt The cup that it's served with it's made out of the knot of a birch tree so they cut the knot out and they process it so it always has these interesting patterns to it. It just tastes like coffee. It's not
really picking up any of the cheese taste but when you get to the bottom of it what you
have is these cheese cubes which are now saturated with the coffee and that tastes kind of weird. I won't lie. But it's kind of good. The texture of the cheese is really good. It's nice and warm and soft. It does absorb the coffee taste so it changes it. but I think I like the cheese on its own with the jam instead of with coffee but its still very interesting to try. The cloudberry jam was really good but you can also get it at IKEA. It just made me crave the fresh berries even more so I moved on. This time to the town of Ranua, proclaimed to be the cloudberry capital of the world. This town has an annual cloudberry festival featuring a number of cloudberry-themed stalls and activities. There's even a cloudberry queen that is crowned each year. This surely was going to be an amazing place to find cloudberries... right? *music* I am at the cloudberry festival in Ranua in Lapland. Just south of the arctic border and there is a disturbing lack of cloudberries here. I mean they're here; there's definitely a few vendors here... probably like five or six vendors. But unlike a lot of festivals I've been to in the past where every vendor has something with cloudberries in it. It seems more like this is your standard street fair with a few cloudberry vendors thrown in. But I think any fair that's going on in Lapland would probably be the same. *music* It became clear that in order to try cloudberries properly, I had to pick them myself. Because cloudberries are so difficult to grow, the majority of what is available commercially are actually harvested in the wild. So finding these meant foraging. Luckily berry picking is a popular pastime in Finland. An
activity that is made easier by the concept of "Every man's Rights" The ministry of the environment of Finland describes every man's rights as: So basically as long as you're respectful, you can legally forage on private land throughout Finland. So I hit the road again, this time with no real destination in mind, just a general area to look in that was recommended to
me by my Airbnb host. So a bit of advice that I got was just go down small paths. So as you can see I found a gravel path here and over here I can see like a little... It looks like people have
walked down here, which I find to be pretty promising. So what I'm going to do is just head down in this direction, try not to get lost, try not to get eaten by a bear and I'm just gonna see what I find. This is a marsh this is what you want It actually looks pretty cozy. I think I could lay on this
like a pillow... except I would get swarmed by bugs. Right now is actually a really bad season for cloudberries because it hasn't been raining that much. So I've been asking people for
advice for cloudberries and they said like "Well you'll find them but not that much because it's
kind of dry out right now" and i'm noticing that so what i've been doing is like walking through
and trying to find wet spots. So this is kind of wet here. I can see like some water here I'm trying to stick towards that wet. Cloudberries are pretty easy to spot in a way but hard in another because they're very bright orange, so they stand out but they only grow one to a plant, which makes it difficult to find in a way because you don't see like a whole bunch
of them like you see with raspberries I feel like I'm tracking,
like I'm tracking an animal. This is pretty wet right here so
that's probably a good thing to follow.. ah! There's one right here. This one though is not fully
developed, it's a little bit red. If that's here there might be others. i'm seeing the leaves all around. It's maybe a good indicator that there's
going to be others around. You may want to spot the leaves as well so if you see a leaf then maybe you can follow it down and find a berry. The good thing with cloud berries is they stand out. So after walking for like I don't know.. five minutes, cloudberries! Here is one cloudberry right here. There's another one up there. over here you can see one... there's one over there you probably see that little orange in the distance.. but you may notice they are solitary. so when you're trying to find cloudberries, you're looking for just like this one single berry on the stalk We're going to do this quick because I'm getting eaten by mosquitoes and random bugs are climbing me. but here it is. It's beautiful. It comes off of the stem, or it should, pretty easily It's very succulent. The little pieces of this look like little orange wedges they're very very big compared to like a raspberry. Oh that's good. You ever had like those little wax bottles? They have like a sweet kind of like nectar inside of it like a sweet juice. it tastes kind of like that. It doesn't taste artificial at all but a nice refreshing syrup sort of flavor The jam I think tastes almost olivey. It has a very savory taste but fresh off the plant it doesn't really taste so super savory I guess it still has a little bit of a apricot kind of taste maybe like a little bit of an orange kind
of flavor like a citrus kind of taste and yeah it does still have a little bit of
like a savory olive kind of flavor too but it's a remote taste to it. Okay I'm going to do some more some more work on this.. ooh that's a nice strong one. Oh and you're not supposed to chew the seeds I keep forgetting you're supposed to push the berry against the roof of your mouth
and let the juice kind of go down your throat because the seeds don't really taste like anything. They're just like woody. This thing is really tasty but it's mild. It's not a strong taste the way
that raspberries are or blackberries are. It has a very low tartness to it. There's a little bit. Maybe like a one or a two out of ten and the sweetness on it... it's pretty sweet I'd say it's about an apple or maybe a little higher i'd say maybe like a like a 6 out of 10 on sweetness. But the weirdest thing with it is that flavor. Cloudberries are the perfect fruit to forage. Not practically... they are hard to find, they are way too perishable and it's hard for you to collect a lot of them but they were so satisfying to find. Each time we picked one, it felt like we were finding a small treasure. With a small Tupperware full of cloudberries, my girlfriend/videographer and I went further north to enjoy our spoils but not before visiting one of Finland's famous fells. So this might be a bit meta or whatever but, as I record this voiceover, about a year has passed since we visited Finland. Now that I'm looking back at all this footage of my lips progressively getting more and more chapped
as I walk through the forests and fells of Lapland, I've realized something... Those cloudberries that I was finding at the markets, those ones that were never quite good enough for me to buy, I'm sure they would have been fine. Maybe not as good as the ones that I foraged but definitely suitable enough for me to give them a proper review but during this trip, I was tricking myself. Cloudberries are hard to find but I could have found them closer to home. I could have bought them at the market in Helsinki but i was having such an incredible
time exploring a beautiful country with my girlfriend, that I wanted to keep looking. I didn't want this hunt to end. The last step in our adventure to find the elusive
cloudberry, was to sit back and enjoy our catch. That night we stayed at a place that was fittingly
whimsical for an area that felt so unreal. There we sat like royalty, indulging
in these decadent little berries that had a freshness to them that money just couldn't
buy. Berries that tasted somewhere between apricot, raspberry, olive oil, citrus and just a dash of nostalgia. I've gone on a lot of fruit hunting adventures now
and my favorite thing about this mission of mine is that moment when a weird fruit
doesn't feel weird to me anymore. It's addictive to find a place far from home where something that is unfamiliar to me is just a part of life. Maybe I misled myself this time around into making that place further away than it really needed to be but in the end, I'm glad that I did. It is 12 o'clock right now... AM This is midnight and it's still daylight. That is why they call Lapland the land of the midnight sun because the sun during some parts of the year doesn't set at all During the summer time I think it just kind of gets like this it'll come down to like this dusk like perpetual dusk kind of
sky and it is so weird and during the daytime it's also like a little dim. Not this dark but it doesn't really get like fully bright. At least while I'm here it hasn't. it just kind of seems like always sunset is coming but then it never comes. The sun just kind of like moves around in the sky but doesn't fully set. It makes you realize just how far north you are. I'm in the arctic circle now and uh there's some weird stuff that happens when you're up this high. Oh, you may hear some dogs barking. Those are huskies. I'm on a husky farm right now staying in a yurt it's kind of a magical thing that's happening right now. Me and my girlfriend. I'm an American she's Canadian. We are staying at a Mongolian yurt in Lapland, which is in Finland and this husky farm is owned by French people. So we are dealing with French people, in Finland, staying in a Mongolian yurt, yet she and I are Canadian and American respectively. What's going on guys? I'm having a very weird a very weird moment right now and i'm walking around at midnight and like the sun is up. This shouldn't be happening but it's happening
and yeah I'm loving every moment of it.
