Shahtoot Season: White vs Black Mulberry (Toot) and Dried Ones

Shahtoot season is short, sticky and purple. Here’s the answer most people want first: white shahtoot is the very sweet, mild one, black (kala) shahtoot is the rich sweet-sour one that stains everything, and both keep only 2 or 3 days, so wash them gently just before eating and buy what you’ll finish. Below: how to tell them apart, how to wash a berry that falls apart if you breathe on it, sharbat, dried white mulberries, and why the tree blamed for Islamabad’s spring allergy isn’t this one at all.

Shahtoot, toot, mulberry: same fruit?

Yes. Toot is the everyday Urdu and Hindi word for mulberry, and shahtoot (“king mulberry”) is what most people call the bigger, better fruit, though at the cart the words get used for all of them. Botanically they’re Morus trees, and the fruit isn’t a true berry at all; each bump on a mulberry grew from its own tiny flower, and the whole cluster ripened together into one soft fruit.

The long kind is a Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa favourite, and nurseries abroad even sell a long variety under the name “Pakistan”. Colour can mislead, though: a white mulberry is ripe when it’s white, while a black type that’s still red is not ready.

Shahtoot season in Pakistan and India

It’s a spring fruit that ends as the real heat arrives: Karachi and Sindh see it first, around late March and April, in Lahore, Faisalabad and most of Punjab it’s roughly April to May, and in Peshawar, the Potohar and the hills it can run into June. North India follows the same pattern, earlier in the plains and later in the hills. Three to six weeks in any one city. That’s all you get.

How to pick good shahtoot

1. Look for full colour for the type: deep black-purple for kala shahtoot, creamy white for safaid.
2. Plump and glossy beats wet and flat. Berries sitting in a puddle of their own juice are crushed and will ferment by evening.
3. Smell the basket. Sweet is right; sour, vinegary or boozy means it’s turning.
4. Check for mould at the bottom of the cone or basket, where it starts.
5. Buy 250 to 500 g at a time. They won’t wait for the weekend.

Fruit shaken off a roadside tree onto a sheet is often the sweetest of all, because it fell when fully ripe, but it’s also dusty and a favourite of ants and fruit flies, so the wash matters more.

How to wash mulberries without mush

A tap flattens shahtoot. Use a bowl.

1. Fill a large bowl with about 2 litres of cool plain water.
2. Tip in up to 250 g berries and leave them for 2 to 3 minutes. Dust sinks, and small insects float up.
3. Lift the berries out with your hands or a slotted spoon. Don’t pour them into a sieve with the dirty water.
4. Give them a quick, gentle rinse under a low stream in a colander.
5. Spread on a clean cotton cloth for 10 minutes to drain.

The little green stalk is edible but chewy. Pinch it off or leave it. No soap, no bleach, no vinegar soak; plain water does the job, as our guide to washing fruit and vegetables explains.

How to store shahtoot

• Fridge: unwashed, in one layer on a paper towel in a shallow box, for 2 to 3 days.
• Room temperature: eat the same day. Spring heat ferments them fast.
• Freezer: wash, drain very well, freeze spread on a tray, then bag. They’re perfect for sharbat and shakes for a few months, and useless for eating fresh once thawed.

Past their best but not mouldy? Cook them. Ten minutes in a pan with a little sugar turns them into a sauce for dahi or kheer.

The purple stains

Kala shahtoot dye is serious. For clothes, rinse from the back under cold water immediately, then wash with detergent; hot water sets it. For hands, soap and a scrub brush do most of it and time does the rest. If you use lemon juice on stained fingers, wash it off before going out in the sun, because citrus on skin plus sunlight can cause a burn-like rash that leaves dark marks. Some elders swear by rubbing an unripe green mulberry on the stain; it’s a folk trick, harmless to try on hands, but don’t count on it.

What shahtoot gives you

A cup of fresh mulberries (about 140 g) comes to roughly 60 kcal, a couple of grams of fibre, a good share of a day’s vitamin C, and more iron than most fruits, which is a lot of goodness for a snack that’s mostly water. It isn’t a blood-sugar remedy, though. The “mulberry lowers sugar” claims you’ll see online are about leaf extracts sold as supplements, not the fruit, and if you have diabetes and are tempted by one, talk to your doctor first, because anything that nudges sugar down on top of your medicine can tip you into a low.

Dried white mulberries: the sugar reality

Dry fruit shops sell dried white mulberries (khushk toot), often from Afghanistan or Iran, and they’re lovely, chewy and crunchy and caramel-sweet, which is exactly the problem, because drying removes the water and keeps the sugar, so a small 30 g handful has roughly 90 to 100 kcal, most of it sugar, about as much as a full bowl of fresh berries. They do bring fibre and iron. Treat them like raisins. Our one-muthi dry fruit portion guide gives the same rule for the rest of the tin. Store them in an airtight jar, away from humidity, or they turn sticky and clump.

Sharbat, shake and chaat

1. Shahtoot sharbat: put 500 g washed black mulberries, 250 ml water and 200 g sugar in a pan and simmer for 10 minutes, mashing as it softens.
2. Strain through a fine sieve, pressing the pulp. Stir in 1 tablespoon lemon juice.
3. Cool and bottle in a clean glass bottle. Keep in the fridge and use within a week.
4. Serve 2 to 3 tablespoons in a glass of chilled water with a pinch of kala namak.

Shake: blend 100 g mulberries with 200 ml cold milk and 1 small banana. No sugar needed. Chaat: 150 g long shahtoot cut in pieces, a pinch of chaat masala, mint. That’s it.

A glass of sharbat is still sugar water with fruit colour, so it’s an occasional pleasure. The whole fruit is the better everyday habit. If you like this sort of drink, our falsa sharbat is shahtoot’s summer neighbour.

The allergy tree is paper mulberry, not shahtoot

Every spring, Islamabad and Rawalpindi suffer from pollen, and the tree usually blamed is called “jangli shahtoot”. That’s paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera), a different plant that belongs to the same family but a different genus, planted widely decades ago and now spread everywhere. Its fruit is a fuzzy orange-red ball, not the shahtoot you buy. Fruiting mulberry pollen can bother some people too, but the big seasonal problem comes from paper mulberry; our pollen calendar covers the months and what helps.

Myths and surprising facts

Myth: shahtoot is “garam” and gives you boils

No fruit causes boils. None. Recurrent boils have real causes worth checking, sugar among them.

• Did you know? White mulberry leaves are the food of silkworms. “Mulberry silk” is named after them.
• Did you know? Unripe green mulberries, and the milky white sap in the leaves and stems, can upset your stomach. Eat ripe fruit only.

For more seasonal fruit guides, see Fruits and Vegetables.

Shahtoot questions, answered