All You Need to Know About Rosehips

Rosehips are one of winter’s prettiest (and most delicious) assets. They have a long history across the Northern Hemisphere: North America to Europe, North Africa to Asia. Not only are they packed full of vitamin C with a tangy flavor that’s perfect for tea, but they also look lovely in the garden and just as lovely in a jar on your counter. What’s not to like?

As if that’s not enough, they’re tasty. Since roses are a popular edible flower, so it stands to reason the pseudo-fruit that develops after the petals fall would be a culinary accessory as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since roses are related to strawberries, rosehips are full of tart and tangy, berry-like flavor. Rosehip jam is even used in Bismark donuts, those delicious, squishy, fried rounds that bakers fill with jelly and sprinkle powdered sugar on top.

Rosehips have become more popular in recent years due to their medicinal potential and use in anti-aging treatments, even making their way onto the ingredients list of various Starbucks beverages. If ever there was a time to start using them yourself, now is the time, with tons of advice and recipes available from chefs, homesteaders, and health nuts alike. Accordingly, here’s a guide to this most underrated of fall “fruits,” including what they are, how to use them, and a few mistakes to avoid. Get ready to get the most out of your winter wombles or time in the garden by bringing rosehips into your kitchen and home.

Any guide to rosehips must start with the question of what exactly constitutes a rose (Rosa genus). Are they just those big, showy flowers in the front yards you walk past? Do they include the trailing vines and brambles you see along hedgerows? What about the climbing roses in English gardens, with lots of small, ephemeral blossoms? Good questions, and points of common confusion, since roses come in such a wide variety.

While any discussion of roses could fill several encyclopedias, there are actually two basic types of cultivated rose: the classic garden rose, which was cultivated before 1867 — the year in which the hybrid tea rose was introduced — and the modern rose, cultivated after. There also exist wild roses, uncultivated varieties that have adapted to life in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, either predating people or growing wild from cultivated varieties. (See? Roses are a lot to handle.)

Many folks would be surprised to learn that roses actually have a fruit, a fleshy pod that ripens in autumn and contains seeds: the hip. It becomes visible after the flower petals have dropped off, appearing almost like a small crabapple. That makes sense, since apples, peaches, and cherries are also in the rose family. Because rosehips are so beautiful and add such a lovely component to a winter garden, many people grow roses as a year-round landscape specimen (including this writer). However, rosehips, which are considered a false fruit (the true fruit being the seeds inside), are also delicious.

For thousands of years, people have turned to rosehips for help with a variety of diseases and health conditions. Rosehips have pretty staggering levels of vitamin C; according to some sources, just a single handful of rosehips contains an amount equivalent to 60 oranges, the fruit that most people conjure in their mind’s eye when they need a boost of vitamin C. It’s no surprise, then, that First Nations tribes turned to rosehips for healing. To ease breathing in sick people, for example, they used both tea and syrup made from rosehips. For mouth sores, the Santa Clara Pueblo employed rosehip salve.

Commercial growers became interested in rosehip production on a large scale back in the ’80s. By 1993, growers had established successful plantations. They are now grown and experimented with in many different habitats due to their pharmaceutical usefulness and the online and in-store demand for dried rosehips.

Yes, the short answer is that all roses produce rosehips. However, some are quite small and not the best for eating since they take too long to process. Some gardeners may not even know they have rosehips because they always deadhead their roses. This means that they remove the blooms once they’ve faded, so the rose doesn’t even have the chance to fruit.

There also exists a number of differences in the rosehips produced by different species. For instance, some rosehips on certain rose plants don’t last very long, so you won’t see them well into the winter the way you might with other species. Some rosehips are more popular with animals than others, so they may even be eaten. And some just don’t have the brightest colors. However, if you have a rose bush in your yard or your hedgerow, you can get hips from it.

If you already know the plant in question is a rose, then you can safely identify the colorful pods as rosehips. If, however, you are not sure, you can look for several characteristics to guide you. First up, start by identifying the rose plant itself. You can distinguish roses by their curved thorns, as well as pinnate leaves in bunches of three to nine leaflets. Cultivated roses have large, obvious blooms, but wild rose blooms are typically smaller, less showy, and either pink or white. The vines may also climb.

The hips themselves are oblong or round, with wispy hairs or leftover petals coming off the end. While the quintessential rosehip is bright orange or red, they start out small, hard, and green, turning to yellow and then orange over the late summer and fall. While the most common colors for rosehips are red or orange, they also come in purple or black varieties. The good news is that roses don’t have a poisonous mimic, as many other plants and mushrooms do, so you’re pretty safe even as a novice forager.

If you don’t grow roses in your garden, then the best way to get rosehips is to forage for them. Roses often grow wild in fields, hedgerows, and at the edges of woodlands. Roses are extremely hardy, growing around the world, so you’ll also find them in ditches, by waterways, and along trail sides. They even grow near the beach, surviving poor soil conditions and intense wind with aplomb. While it’s inadvisable to harvest rosehips from public property, you can ask private property owners for permission to harvest on their grounds.

The best time to look for them is in fall, though in temperate areas, you can often find good rosehips even after the first frost. If you don’t already have patches staked out, then go later in the year when the leaves are off the trees. That way, the bright color of the hips can guide you. If you don’t have anywhere to forage them, or don’t have the interest, you can buy them online. While it’s hard to find them fresh unless you’re willing to pay wholesale prices, they’re quite affordable dried.

As with so many other ingredients, it’s important to let the flavor of rosehips guide you when choosing what to do with them. Reports about rosehip flavor vary. The flavor can depend on so many factors such as where they are sourced from, the type of rosehip, whether they’re dried, when in the season they’ve been harvested, and so on. However, in general, rosehips are tart and tangy, tasting like an underripe berry. Some people compare the taste of them to tart apples or plums.

Other sources describe them as having notes of hibiscus and even a faint flavor of raw pumpkin. Much of the discrepancy is probably down to the above factors, but across the board, rosehips are described as a bit sweet, a little bit sour, and a lot floral. Depending upon the product, you may even be able to taste that rose flavor coming through.

Rosehips are edible even without cooking, but any good guide to rosehips should contain one giant caveat: Watch out for the hairs. The inside of the hip contains seeds and tiny hairs that should not be consumed. The hairs are incredibly irritating and can cause itching in the mouth, throat, and digestive tract. They can even cause itching when they — ahem — emerge on the other side. So never chew up a rosehip straight off the bush because you will regret it … for a while.

The seeds should be avoided raw as well. They contain cyanide, like many other members of the rose family (including apples and cherries). For that reason, you should always remove the seeds and hairs if you’re going to use the hip raw, like in a green salad. If you are, the proper approach is to cut them in half and gut them, so that you’re left with the fleshy outer part. You can also squeeze out the pulp of really ripe rosehips, which will come out like toothpaste. Kind of gross, kind of delicious, but very good for you.

Experienced foragers recommend tasting rosehips when you’re collecting them to make sure they have good flavor. To do this without ingesting seeds or hairs, simply nibble off the fleshy outside of the hip, leaving the whitish core intact. If you’re careful, you’ll be fine.

You’ve probably heard of rose tea, but did you know the fruit can make for a tasty a hot beverage like the flowers can? A frequent addition to both bagged and looseleaf herbal teas, rosehips bring a tart and tangy flavor similar to hibiscus, green apple, or plum to steaming cups, which become even better when combined with a few fresh strawberries (a fave fresh strawberry hack), since the two flavors go together well. Although you can certainly buy rosehip tea in both loose-leaf (such as FGO Organic Rosehips Tea) and bagged varieties (like Buddha Teas Organic Rose Hips Tea), if you have access to rosehips yourself, it’s easy enough to make it by harvesting and drying berries. You can also put dried rosehips in a tea infuser, which is simply a kettle with a removal strainer inside to catch the loose-leaf ingredients after they’re done steeping.

Some people also use rosehips to make wine, while others turn them into liqueurs. Cold-pressing is sometimes recommended as the best way to get maximum nutrients out of rosehips before you brew them, which you can do using an at-home manual press.

You don’t have to use a press, however. There are many home brewing kits (like this one from Home Brew Ohio) that require nothing more than tossing your fruit of choice into a bucket with a lid and siphon, fermenting it, then putting it in a jug. And just like that, you’ve got rosehip wine. (Okay, maybe it’s not quite that easy, but still … pretty easy.) The extra-good news is that, while cooking rosehips destroys some of the vitamin A and C content — one of the rosehip’s biggest selling points — winemaking preserves both.

Rosehips make themselves useful in a wide variety of foods as well as beverages, and no guide is complete without discussing the many possibilities at your disposal. Because the hip most closely resembles fruit or berries as an ingredient, you’ll often find it in sweet foods. Think jelly, for example, the lovely tang of the hips complements the sweetness of sugar well. Rosehips gel nicely, so you don’t need to add a thickening agent when you make jam or jelly with your harvest. However, if you want to make sure your hips take on a smooth, stable consistency, it never hurts to look up a recipe that calls for pectin. Pectin is a soluble fruit fiber that adds thickening power, so it can be helpful if you find your jellies just don’t gel.

Rosehip syrups are also popular. Also note that you may see rosehip syrup online as rosehip cordial, which usually means a flavored mixer, not a liqueur, but you should check. It is commonly prescribed for colds and the flu. Some people also like to infuse rosehips into water before adding it to honey. If you just want to cut to the chase and eat dessert, rosehip ice cream can do the trick, and you’ll find several recipes online.

Before you think it can only be used as a sweet, though, wait! They can also be added to vinaigrettes, vinegars, and even bone or veggie broth. If you really want to go all out, consider rosehip soup, a Swedish dish that is thickened with potato starch and flavored with lemon and cinnamon, then served with almond macaroons.

No guide to rosehips is complete without discussing the best varieties to grow in your home garden, should you be up to the challenge. If you choose to accept the mission, then the first step is to break the habit of deadheading roses. Granted, there is good reason to deadhead. Usually, this prevents the plant from putting its resources into the production of hips and can extend the blooming cycle, right up until the first frost. Of course, in your case, encouraging hip production is exactly what you want to do, so put away those shears for a few months. Spent flower heads can look messy, so you can gently brush petals away once they dry if you really can’t stand it.

If you already have roses in your yard, yay! Feel free to leave those spent flower heads in place and see what happens. If you want to plant roses for hips, then there are a few easygoing options with which to start. Burnet rose (Rosa spinosissima) has minimal growing requirements, flowers early, and has beautiful black rosehips that make a nice change of pace color-wise. Rugosa rose (Rosa rugosa) has big, red, round hips that look beautiful and have a lot of fruit value. Virginia rose (Rosa virginiana) has slightly flattish-looking hips in bright scarlet that set their color early and last until spring.

To harvest rosehips, use a clean, sharp pair of pruning shears. Gathering rosehips is often a cold-weather activity, so you may want to minimize the time you spend outdoors by cutting off rosehip clusters rather than individual berries. You can bring the clusters inside and trim them neatly where you’re warm. This means you’ll need a larger gathering basket, though, so make sure you have enough space — especially if you’re trekking somewhere far afield.

Once you’ve got your rosehip clusters in hand, snip each rosehip off the stem, then remove the base and leftover flowers (the “tops and tails”) either with the shears or your hands. Try not to cut into the flesh too much. Wash the rosehips, then lay them on a towel until dry to the touch. After washing your rosehips, you can either use them fresh or dry them.

There are three basic methods for drying rosehips so you can store them long term: dehydrator, oven, and air. If it’s warm where you are, you can spread the rosehips on a tray or screen to air dry, which will take several weeks. If, however, you live somewhere cold or wet, you should use the oven or food dehydrator instead. Set your oven to the lowest setting and dry the hips in a single layer on a cookie sheet until completely desiccated. In a dehydrator, choose the raw foods setting and allow them to dry for a day or so.

To preserve dried rosehips as long as possible, keep them in jars with tight-fitting lids, away from heat, light, and moisture. If you like, you can jar them up whole and keep them that way until ready to make tea.

However, some people prefer crushed rosehips that they can rehydrate or use in recipes, in which case, you’ll want to take an additional step. Simply crush them up in a mortar and pestle or in a food processor— only give them a few pulses, though. Then take the crushed bits and shake them through a sieve, which will allow the hairs to fall through. Remember, those are the parts of the hip that you can’t consume, as they’re too irritating to the throat. The remaining outer pieces of the hip and the seeds are both fine to consume, so jar them up and you’re good to go.

Since fresh rosehips are a form of produce like any other, they’ll keep for a few days to a few weeks in the fridge. It is better, though, to process them as soon as possible because they’ll last for years in dried form.

Rosehips contain tons of vitamin C, antioxidants, and nutrients. A 2-tablespoon serving of rosehips equates to 76 percent of your daily value of vitamin C and contains small servings of vitamins A, B5, and E, as well as 6 grams of carbs and 4 grams of fiber. Rosehips are also full of carotenoids, such as lycopene and beta carotene, which perform vital services for your skin and eyes.

Vitamin C, which is critical for immunity and collagen production, is especially important, since our bodies don’t store it, meaning we need reliable sources of it in food. That’s why ancient cultures were so reliant on plants such as rosehips that provided vitamins in the wintertime when other sources were hard to find.

Rosehips provide a number of other health benefits as well. They have anti-inflammatory properties. Moreover, rosehips may help lower blood sugar and offer relief from arthritis pain. Note, however, that use of supplements — especially when taking more than as directed on the bottle — may put you at risk of side effects, including GI distress, sleep issues, and headache, among other symptoms. It’s best to consume whole foods unless directed to take supplements by a physician.