Preserves
Preserving. Oh yes. I still have vivid memories of the Nanaimo years, buying boxes of organic apricots and peaches, gathering pails of plums, apples and pears. Using the pressure canner to can salmon (perhaps my favourite!). Shelves glowing with the colours of summer, all in neat rows of glass jars. One year we even back lit a shelf just to enjoy it.
But the memories of doing it are something else. Hot. Sticky. Tired from long production processes. Real preserving implies having lots of harvest, lots of glass jars, and lots of time. And so it remained. In memory. As a busy academic i don't have the (family) manpower, the time, or indeed, the ability to eat all of this food. So preserving remained off my agenda. Until now.
First, a colleague at work, Age Jorgensen, a plant biologist who grows fruit in greenhouses, gave me the fruit in the above image. He grows the most amazing black currents (or 'solbaer' as they call them here -- 'sun berries'), and huge cherries. Plus the rare white current and Rips-on-steroids (the red currants). I was massively grateful, of course. And gorged myself for a couple of days. But still there was all this fruit! (Quantities are relative when you live by yourself...). Too lovely to just let go. And so i started thinking. And searching.
And discovered "Small Batch Jamming". Now we are talking. :>)
This is a great way to approach preserving! Not so hot, not so messy, easy to clean up. And i had the perfect quantities of fruit (circa 2 1/2 cups). First was the blackcurrant jam (echoing the black currant jam my mum made every year). Then cherry. The next day i made white currant.
And then i got really inspired! First i started to think of making the white currant as jelly, without the seeds. And maybe with a tisane of black currant leaves (ever smelled black currant leaves? Try it.). Jellies. Can't be so hard, right? And from there it wasn't so far to the ultimate inspiration -- Red Pepper Jelly!! And so the learning journey began....
You will find the results on the next pages.
But for now i would encourage you to see these small batch preserves as a home made version of some of the molecular gastronomy things that chefs use. Why not make single fruit jellies and flavour them? Why not red, or green pepper jelly? How about tomato jam? Be creative. If you cook them with care they don't have to be cloyingly sweet and monochrome in flavour. Experiment! It will be well worth it.
But the memories of doing it are something else. Hot. Sticky. Tired from long production processes. Real preserving implies having lots of harvest, lots of glass jars, and lots of time. And so it remained. In memory. As a busy academic i don't have the (family) manpower, the time, or indeed, the ability to eat all of this food. So preserving remained off my agenda. Until now.
First, a colleague at work, Age Jorgensen, a plant biologist who grows fruit in greenhouses, gave me the fruit in the above image. He grows the most amazing black currents (or 'solbaer' as they call them here -- 'sun berries'), and huge cherries. Plus the rare white current and Rips-on-steroids (the red currants). I was massively grateful, of course. And gorged myself for a couple of days. But still there was all this fruit! (Quantities are relative when you live by yourself...). Too lovely to just let go. And so i started thinking. And searching.
And discovered "Small Batch Jamming". Now we are talking. :>)
This is a great way to approach preserving! Not so hot, not so messy, easy to clean up. And i had the perfect quantities of fruit (circa 2 1/2 cups). First was the blackcurrant jam (echoing the black currant jam my mum made every year). Then cherry. The next day i made white currant.
And then i got really inspired! First i started to think of making the white currant as jelly, without the seeds. And maybe with a tisane of black currant leaves (ever smelled black currant leaves? Try it.). Jellies. Can't be so hard, right? And from there it wasn't so far to the ultimate inspiration -- Red Pepper Jelly!! And so the learning journey began....
You will find the results on the next pages.
But for now i would encourage you to see these small batch preserves as a home made version of some of the molecular gastronomy things that chefs use. Why not make single fruit jellies and flavour them? Why not red, or green pepper jelly? How about tomato jam? Be creative. If you cook them with care they don't have to be cloyingly sweet and monochrome in flavour. Experiment! It will be well worth it.
