Learnings:
- Remember to leave space in the freezer for harvest time.
- Use a bigger pan :D
Showing posts with label recipe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recipe. Show all posts
August Harvest and Ratatouille
Seville Orange Marmalade
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| Hubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble.... |
Ingredients ratio:
Use 1.5Kg Seville oranges to 3Kg sugar and 1.5Kg water, plus 2 lemons.
The magic recipe:
Scrub the oranges and boil in the water for 1.5 to 2 hours or until the fruit is soft when poked with a knife point, then let it all cool. Take the oranges out and cut them in half, saving the juice in a bowl and scraping out all the insides into a different bowl. A teaspoon does this job very well. Cut the peel into whatever size you want and keep it for later on. Heat up the same water and add the sugar. You may need to add a bit more water to have enough to dissolve the sugar. Do not boil it yet! (Now is a good time to put a couple of plates into the freezer for testing setting point.) Take the pot of orange-insides and push it through a sieve into the solution, add the orange juice and the chopped peel plus the juice from your 2 lemons. Boil it all up until setting point is reached (105 degrees Celsius, 220 degrees Fahrenheit) and while this is happening put your clean jars into the oven to warm up.
Let the marmalade cool a little and add a knob of butter if there's scum on the top. Stir it in and the scum will disappear. Now you can start filling the jars with a ladle or a jug, lid them up while hot and label.
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| Ready for Labelling |
Learnings:
- Don’t add too much water at the second stage when dissolving the sugar or you’ll be boiling it for ages to get to setting point.
- Fill some smaller jars and use pretty labels to keep as presents for friends and family.
- It always takes longer than you think it will!
Sloe Gin Recipe
With preparations
for Christmas, thoughts are turning to those lovely bottles of sloe-gin-to-be
that are maturing in our store cupboard. Although some recipes dictate waiting
for 6 months to a year before decanting, we always do ours before Christmas –
and it’s so delicious I thought I would share how we make it.
Sloes are the
fruit of the blackthorn, which is the thorny shrubby bush you find next to fields
and footpaths. Some say it’s best to pick fruit after the first frost as this
breaks down the skin and pulp ready for the sugar and alcohol to act, but we usually
pick ours in September provided the fruits are large and plump enough.
Start with a
few bottles of the basic cheap gin you can get in most supermarkets and have a
couple of large empty preserving jars to hand.
Fill a jar
2/3rds full of washed sloes (don’t bother to prick them it’s a waste of time)
then fill with sugar till it covers the sloes. You’ll need about half the
weight of sugar to sloes but it’s best to have it sweeter if in doubt. Then
fill with gin to the top and put the lid on tight. Invert the jar a couple of
times to get rid of any air bubbles and top up with gin again. Carry on with
this ratio of sloes/sugar/gin until you run out.
Then all you
need to do is stand the jars/bottles in a cool, dark place and invert them a
couple of times each day in the first couple of weeks to help the sugar
dissolve. You can leave it for 3 to 12 months; it’s entirely up to you. We’ve
been slack and left ours on the sloes for a year and it hasn’t made any
perceptible difference.
Anyway, when
it tastes sweet and syrupy, strain it through muslin into a fresh bottle. If
you get an odd bottle which is not as sweet then just mix it all together in a
large pan and then decant it into bottles.Then you’re ready to try sloe sherry:
put the ginny sloes into half a bottle of medium sherry and leave it for 6
months! Or try Vodka…
Merry Christmas!
Learnings:
- Keep an eye out for your potential sloe crop and make sure you get there before anybody else does.
- Decanting is a sticky process so have everything to hand and wear a wipeable apron if possible.
- Don’t drink it all at once…
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