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Preserving the Bounty
Monday, February 28th, 2011 In In the Kitchen, portfolio
Preserving seasonal fruit and veggies for use year round is a passion of ours and Pete has especially taken to making our jams and beverages. So he was as keen as me to make good use of the apricots, plums and cherries which we have so many of at the moment.
We tried a friend’s lemon curd a while ago and Pete decided that he wanted to give it a go himself. I’ve only tried it straight out of the pan so far but jeez it tastes good – I can’t wait to try it in the next cheesecake or fruit flan we make.
The cherries are a different matter, we’ve never really had so many fresh before (they are really expensive in Brisbane) and it’s a temptation just to eat the whole lot now. But being me I know I’ll be kicking myself in months to come that I can’t have just a morsel of those cherries to taste again! Pete’s quite keen to make a cherry brandy and as it uses less than half the amount we have I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all – I’ll just have to get used to the taste of brandy! I’d love to make a jam but there won’t be enough so I might just have to make do with freezing a couple of hundred grams and occasionally fishing one out of the freezer to put into a smoothie or to decorate a cake.
Our household are big jam eaters, so plum and apricot jam are a must. I’ve started experimenting a bit with mixing other flavours in there. A friend of ours makes a legendary apricot and ginger jam so I might have to be super sweet to her and ask for the recipe. The rest of the apricots have been dried, eaten fresh or cut in two and frozen, the remaining cherries will be devoured in the next 24 hours I’d say!
So all in all it’s been a pretty amazing day, we’ve had so much fun and for $31 we’ve got 8 jars of apricot jam, 3 jars of apricot curd, 2.5 bottles of plum sauce, 2 jars of dried apricots a bottle of cherry brandy and enough fresh fruit for the rest of the week. A lot of hard work today but we will be enjoying it for the rest of the year.
The book we use for most of our preserves is called ‘A Year in a Bottle’ by Sally Wise and we also love the Edmonds Cookbook – famous in NZ!
Solar Drying – for the first time
Monday, February 28th, 2011 In In the Kitchen, portfolioOn our trip to the orchard today we picked almost 5 kilos of apricots, 1.5 kilos of cherries and we have 4 trees in our own yard brimming with plums.
Before I started preserving a few years ago I would have felt completely overwhelmed with so much food at risk of spoiling, now I see it as a great opportunity. I especially like working out how I can make sure I’m still eating the fruit / veg by this time next year!
I’ve always been a huge fan of dried apricots and over the past few months I’ve been designing a solar food dryer in my head. Unfortunately this hasn’t quite come to fruition yet, so I decided to try drying out some of the apricots a different way. I looked up how to dry apricots online, since I haven’t tried my hand at drying before, and was pleased to see that it’s supposed to be a fairly easy process.
Firstly the fruit had to be prepared which involved spraying them with vinegar, a good rinse in water and chopping in half. Then I pushed them gently inside out before a 5 minute dip in a lemony water to reduce colouration or oxidation. I spread them out evenly out on a cake rack on top of a baking tray and put them outside.
It was a pretty warm day today and I was aiming for 37 degrees so I thought that was do-able in direct sunlight. I put some netted food covers over for protection from flies and let the sun do its job. I’d say they went out at about noon and got a good 4hrs before the wind picked up.
Then I changed the fly netting for an upside down glass oven dish and continued on. The apricots were looking pretty parched and starting to loose some of their shape by this stage. At about 6pm the clouds rolled in (we’re lucky to have daylight savings here and its usually light till 9.30pm) so I decided to bring the trays inside and finish the job in the oven.
I put the oven on to 75 degrees and opened the door every 30 minutes to let the condensation dry out, after about an hour the were really looking great, soft and pliable but not squishy & wet feeling. I left them for a final 30mins, then turned off the oven and let them to cool in there for a bit.
Finally, I tasted one – WOW – talk about a flavour hit, it was awesome, better than any store bought I’ve had before! As far as storage goes I’m a bit of a stickler for food safety so I popped them in a clean jar and keep them in the fridge. I plan to use them for snacks and in our home made muesli.
I was quite pleased with that result and I will definitely try solar drying again soon, what I did learn is that using the glass dish instead of fly netting is a better option for heat retention and I’ll be redesigning my metal dehydrator with this in mind – imagine a box with a glass lid, racks in the middle and a vented bottom. I also read that the inside a car (under the windscreen) is a good way to do it on a cooler day to get the temperature up naturally.
I used ordinary household items and only resorted to the oven for an hour and a half at 75 degrees due to the weather, which hopefully won’t add to my power bill too much. If I hadn’t used the oven I think it might have taken another 6 hours in the sun.
If you want to read the drying instructions I used click here. Happy Drying!