Blackberries 125g

When blackberries are in season they are one of the great pleasures of the Australian summer. Deep, jammy and intensely flavoured with a complexity that raspberries and blueberries can't match, a peak season blackberry eaten straight from the punnet is genuinely hard to beat. Late summer is your window, roughly January through March, when domestic crops are at their finest and the flavour is at full depth.

Available outside this window but the peak season punnet is the one worth getting truly excited about. If you see them in January or February, buy them without hesitation.

Eat them fresh over vanilla ice cream, fold through a pavlova, stir into a crumble with apple or pear, blend into a smoothie, or cook down with a little sugar into a sauce that works over everything from porridge to cheesecake. A good blackberry is one of the most versatile fruits in the shop.

Look for deep near-black colour with no red tinges and a dry punnet with no moisture or soft spots. The deeper the colour the better the flavour.