In spite of the drought (or maybe because of it) this has been a great year for berries at my place. We are just harvesting service berries now and it is a great crop; sweet and plentiful.
One thing I noticed in eating these berries raw, every so often I run into one which has a strong flavor of almond as I eat it. Since almond “flavor” is basically cyanide (they say cyanide gas smells like almonds, but really it is the cyanide in almonds that give them their flavor), I am thinking that these almond flavored berries must have an excess of the cyanide producing compounds in their seeds, or that perhaps they fermented a bit which transformed those compounds in the seed to “almond flavor”/cyanide.
From what I have read, it is the seeds which contain the cyanide producing compounds (cyanogenic
glycosides) but that normally the fruit is free of it. Although the leaves and other plants parts do contain some which varies over the year. And since the cyanide is only produced when the compound interacts with other chemicals, an almond tasting berry must have had something chemically working on its seed.
I am not too concerned about cyanide poisoning here, but I would like to understand what is going on with those almond flavored berries. Anyone have a theory?
