‘Bright, glossy and rotund’: the best supermarket strawberries

Back in 1994, I used to pick strawberries in Dorset to earn extra pocket money. It was gruelling but delicious work. We’d shuffle on our hands and knees down furrowed rows of plants, picking those beautiful, fat red berries and trying not to eat too many along the way.

We were paid by the punnet, which at my picking speed amounted to less than £1 an hour, unlike the impressively fast seasonal workers who came to our village every summer. I scored the strawberries below on sweetness first, using a Brix refractometer, which measures the sugar content of fruit and veg (each Brix point represents 1% sucrose in the juice by mass).

Sweetness isn’t everything, and some berries showed a lovely, complex, honeyed or floral flavour; tartness helps bring balance and a refreshing quality. As a rule of thumb, go for fruit with a bright red body, fresh green leaves and a powerful but fresh aroma.

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