Archive for the 'preserves' Category
Warning: this is a kitchen project I got a little overexcited about. Kind of like rendering our own lard.
We made sea salt.
I’d never have thought of it, but Ashley walked us through the process recently, and the idea stuck. It turned out to be a perfect indoor project when the sideways rain forced us to come in and dry off. I’m on my fourth batch now; fifth if you count our first one, which we forgot about as it neared its final stages and we turned on a movie. You can go about your business as you make salt, but as you get used to how quickly it cooks down, particularly toward the end, you’ll get a sense of when to stick around.
I’ve become preoccupied with bringing my water jar to the beach and have soaked myself a couple times attempting to get the very best sample from an incoming wave. And it has quickly become the norm these past couple mornings to get up and put on the coffee and the salt. As long as we’re puttering around the house, I have a pan of ocean simmering. To save energy and relax my attention, I’ve been bringing it to a boil, then turning off the heat and letting it steam away with the residual heat of the flat stovetop. When I know I’ll be in the kitchen, I finish it off.
To make sea salt: get yourself some seawater, pour it through a sieve lined with a paper coffee filter (Ashely used a few layers of cheesecloth, but I had coffee filters – and I actually like that it for sure gets rid of any iota of grit) and you’ll very easily have a vessel full of crystal clear water. I barely noticed any residue on the filter, even, but it probably depends on your source.
Bring it to a boil and cook it until the water evaporates and you’re left with salt. Lovely, damp, fine-grained sea salt. It’s really that simple. I used a large stainless skillet instead of a pot: more surface area = faster evaporation.
It will start like any other pot of enthusiastically boiling water. After awhile it will be a little less rollicking; the bubbles more clustered together and smaller. When it gets really low, a stir will produce a flurry of fine bubbles.
Toward the end it will look sludgy and opaque, but still you may not be convinced that there is a good quantity of salt in there. I wasn’t. Until the very end, when it turns into a sort of sandy paste, at which point I give it a stir to break up the clumps and take it off the heat to finish drying out with the residual heat of the pan.
A completely awesome science project-slash-culinary experiment-slash-totally spring break thing to do. Except that now W wants us to make our own pepper.
It took an hour or so to cook down about 1 1/2 L of water, which produced about 1/4 cup of salt. Enough to fill a small bowl and plant on your kitchen counter to pinch from, each time taking great joy in the fact that I was eating pure salt from the ocean outside our window. I’m now making extra to bring back home and send to some of my favourite food/Tofino lovers.
Also? It tastes awesome. So far we’ve sprinkled it on poached eggs, asparagus and popcorn. I’m a little distracted by the idea of poaching an egg in filtered sea water, or cooking pasta. I’ll report back.
March 31 2012 | preserves | 30 Comments »
I’ve been running a pretty tight ship, refrigerator-wise. I’m digging right through to the back, taking inventory. On one such spelunking mission I came up with a bag containing 6 overripe pears. Pale yellow and dented, they were far too delicate to travel any distance in a lunch bag. There were too many to grate into muffins or pancakes. My freezer, which unloads the same container of pesto and a few disks of pastry dough every time I open the door, had no room. So while W sat at the table and did his home reading out loud, I chopped them into a pot with some water, sugar and ginger and made a compote. Or jam. Or something that looks great in a jar and is delicious on toast.
It’s not as sweet as most jam, which is why I felt the need to call it a compote. I dumped in a handful of cranberries from the freezer as an afterthought, which made it irresistibly sweet-tart and blushed. It might have been raspberries, or rhubarb. Whatever’s falling out of your freezer.
I admit I winged this. If you cook fruit and sugar it’s inevitable that at some point you’ll wind up with something jam-like. But this is roughly how it was done. (And no, you don’t need to peel your pears. Too much work, and those ripe skins are so thin you don’t even notice them. Plus they have fibre, which is a good thing.) By the way, those are Weck jars, from Crate & Barrel Southcentre!
Cranberry-Pear Ginger Preserves
5-6 ripe pears, cored and roughly chopped
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup water or apple juice
1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger
1-2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
Put everything into a pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, occasionally mashing with a large spoon or potato masher, until the mixture thickens, looks more uniform and jam-like. (Remember it will thicken as it cools.) Transfer to clean jars and refrigerate.
Makes 3-4 cups.
January 25 2012 | breakfast and preserves | 7 Comments »
It’s a good day when you get to spend most of it in your PJ pants – until you have to upgrade to yoga pants to go pick up the kid from school, anyway – and in the middle of it someone drops by with a few pastries and a couple loaves of still-warm bread.
I didn’t have any butter. But – tragedy averted: I had about a cup of cream. Making butter really isn’t a biggie, and yet although it’s been on my radar since we took turns shaking up that little container of whipping cream in elementary school, passing it from kid to kid until it transformed into butter (that really could be an analogy for a lot of things, couldn’t it?) I rarely do it myself. If I’m out of butter, I run to the corner store, or send Mike, or put it on the shopping list. I don’t think to make it, but it couldn’t be easier. Or better. (Then again, I rarely have heavy cream in the fridge either. Maybe I’ll start to? Heavy cream meaning 35% whipping cream, the heaviest commonly available.)
It would be worth getting into the habit of making butter for my own use (apart from baking, I mean – I’ll share it with the boys) – after all, if I’m going to eat butter, it may as well be the good stuff. Think homemade chocolate chip cookies vs the bagged kind.
Have you seen the cost of high-end butter? To buy a pint of cream and make your own is a steal.
As I was saying, it’s no biggie – I was working in the kitchen anyway, and so poured the cream into the bowl of the stand mixer, covered the top with plastic wrap (it gets splattery) and turned it on. That’s about it. It’ll churn away, first turning into whipped cream, then something stiffer than whipped cream, and then suddenly you’ll hear it get wet and splashy as it separates into butter and thin buttermilk. (This is why I like using plastic wrap rather than a tea towel – not only can you seal the edges, you can see through it to see how the cream is changing, and hear when the butter separates from the buttermilk and splashes on the plastic film.) That’s it.
You’ll wind up with pure butter that looks like a wad of moulding clay – simply pull it out and put it in a crock, or dish, or jar. It will be a perfect spreading texture. Yes, that’s glittery purple nail polish.
You could add salt to it of course, before or after. Or try spreading your bread with sweet butter and sprinkling it with a pinch of coarse salt. Heaven. Especially when it’s -11 outside and you’re still in your PJ pants.
January 11 2012 | preserves | 29 Comments »
I love when you have a friend who goes grape picking in the Okanagan and brings you back a box of tight bunches of Coronation grapes, some with twisty vines still attached. If this hasn’t recently happened to you, sorry.
Or… perhaps we should arrange a field trip to the Okanagan?
So I have this box of Coronation grapes – the seedless version of Concords, those dusty indigo blue grapes that pop out of their skins and have far more flavour than the lacklustre green and pale purple ones you see year-round at the grocery store. They’re great for eating, but they also make delicious other things, like cakes and focaccia and chutney and jelly, which is actually a snap to make.
And it tastes surprisingly like the grape jelly of my childhood – not a whole lot more sophisticated.
To make Grape Jelly: simmer 1 1/2 lb Concord or Coronation grapes with 3 Tbsp. lemon juice for about 10 minutes, until the grapes pop; strain through a sieve and return the grape juice to the pan with 1 cup sugar. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes, until the jam reaches 220?F on a candy thermometer. Cool and refrigerate for up to a month.
That’s it. It’s thicker than jelly, but I’m not sure I’d call it jam, as all the solids have been strained out. Preserves, perhaps? I love the purpleness of it, especially when spreading on toast or filling little tartlet cups lined with white cheddar pastry. Seemed like a good idea.
Concord Grape Jelly Tarts or Hand Pies
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 cup butter, chilled and cut into pieces
1/4 cup shortening, chilled and cut into pieces
1/2-1 cup grated old white cheddar or 1/4 cup ground hazelnuts or pecans
2-4 Tbsp. ice-cold water
Grape jelly/preserves, for filling
Make the pastry: in a large bowl or the bowl of a food processor, stir together the flour, sugar and salt. Add the butter, shortening and cheese or hazelnuts and use a fork, pastry blender, wire whisk or the “pulse” motion of the food processor to blend the mixture until it resembles coarse meal, with lumps of fat no bigger than a pea.
Drizzle the minimum amount of water over the mixture and stir until the dough comes together, adding a little more a bit at a time if you need it. Gather the dough into a ball, flatten it into a disc, wrap it in plastic and chill for at least half an hour, or freeze for up to 6 months if you want a head start on things.
To fill, roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface about 1/4-inch thick; cut into rounds with a cookie cutter or glass rim. Fit into mini muffin tins, pressing up the sides, and fill with a spoonful of jam, filling it only about halfway. If you like, cut the scraps into little shapes to place on top of the jam.
Alternatively, make little hand pies (aka turnovers) by putting a spoonful of jam in the middle of each round, brushing the edge with a little beaten egg or milk, and folding it over, turnover-style. Press the edge closed with a fork to seal, and poke the top with a fork. Transfer to a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Either way, bake in a preheated 400F oven for 20-25 minutes, until golden. Remove from the pan while still warm. Makes lots.
September 27 2011 | dessert and preserves | 19 Comments »
This one’s for you, Suchalab (from yesterday’s comments). Everyone should know how to make a ‘fridge pickle. (Also? They’re not just for cucumbers anymore. Think onions! Think carrots! Think beets! Think beans! Think fennel!)
These are the pickles I brought to David on the show on Tuesday. I made them quickly, slicing up a lone cuke that arrived in my CSA box, and covering it with a quick brine of rice vinegar, sugar, salt and pickling spices – something I picked up in the bulk spice section, but looks like mustard seed, coriander and bay leaves? With other bits in it?
As I wrote in Swerve a couple weeks ago, there are a few factors that keep would-be pickle enthusiasts from pursuing this particular craft: the time commitment of putting up dozens of enormous jars of baby cukes, and then those dozens of jars, filled with dill pickles or the like, occupying a good chunk of valuable real estate in the pantry. As with jam, there’s no reason a batch of pickles should require bushels of veggies, dozens of canning jars, proper processing equipment plus an entire afternoon spent in their service. Quick pickles come together quickly and in small batches – a single jar in the fridge is all you need, right? When you think of a refrigerator pickle as simply brined or marinated veggies, they don’t seem quite so intimidating.
Quick Refrigerator Pickles
Measurements here are pretty lax – really just go for enough brine to cover whatever it is you want to pickle. Add more sugar for sweeter pickles.
1 cup rice or apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp. sugar (or more, if you like sweeter pickles)
1 Tbsp. coarse salt
1 garlic clove, smashed (optional)
2 tsp. pickling spice or mustard seed (or a sprig of fresh dill)
2 small cucumbers (or 4 mini ones), sliced on a slight diagonal
In a small saucepan, bring the vinegar, sugar, salt, garlic and pickling spice to a simmer. Pour over the cucumber slices in a small bowl or jar. Cool, then refrigerate. Let them hang out for at least a day or two before you eat them.
September 14 2011 | preserves | 8 Comments »
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