Elderberry and Apple Jam experiment

To-ing and fro-ing The Hut (our office which was a chicken/pig house once upon a time)I pass an elder bush/tree. It is laden with elder berries. Up early one morning, and it was time to be bold and do a bit of wild foody-ing. Being of the thinking that produce bought from a supermarket or a market is viable food, and that if something is grown from a seed packet which looks the same as the photo or drawing on the packet then that is OK to eat as well, I have a natural nervousness about eating food from the wild. Now I know that the elder is not exactly growing wild, but it is still not an organised type of food. Last year I managed to avoid the elder berry project. This year I couldn't. Time to be bold and take one more step with wild foody-ing type self sufficiency.

I cut the umbrells of elderberries off, and weighed them. I didn't want to be greedy and take more than my needs. Wild foody-ing is about being aware that everything else is needing the food as well, like the birds, wasps, ants, etc, so all I was going to take was the quantity that I needed, and nothing more:

I separated the elderberries from the stalks by using a fork thus:

Then put them into a bowl of water. The unripe berries floated to the top:

All prepped. I had already found an easy recipe in Marguerite Patten's Jams, Preserves and Chutneys, (ISBN 1-902304-72-1, and my instinct told me to head for Elderberry and Apple Jam rather than just Elderberry Jam:

1lb (450g) Cooking Apples (weight when peeled and cored)
3 tablespoons of water
1lb (450g) Elderberries
2lb (900g) Sugar (I used preserving sugar)
2 tablespoons Lemon Juice (I put the juice from 1 lemon in)

As you can see, an easy recipe.

1) Cube apples into small pieces, and into pan with the water. Simmer for 10 minutes.
2) Add elderberries, continue cooking until soft. Actually I neglected to read the cooking method, and put the elderberries and apples in all together. It didn't seem to make much difference.
3) Add sugar and lemon juice, stir over low heat until the sugar has dissolved then boil rapidly until setting point is reached.
Well, did just that, and did a setting test within a couple of minutes. Now my method for testing for set is to take the pot of jam off the heat, stir a large long handled spoon round in the jam so that it is well coated, then go outside, wave the spoon about a bit so it cools down rapidly, and if the jam is set it will hang in a nice blob from the spoon.

The jam did that, much to my surprise. Wow, I thought. This is easy. Not like the marrow and ginger jam I made the other day which never did set properly but made a gorgeous syrupy compot that is great for putting over the surface of a cake just out of the oven, so is still usable.

So I decanted the jam from the pot into the warm jars, and sealed them down, with a half a jar left over for testing for taste.

It never set. ***** I thought. Tasted OK though, like the apple and blackberry jam my Mum made when I was young.

Ten days later, and I had a window of opportunity to address the four pots of jam and sort their contents out. Back into the pan the non-set jam went, to be boiled for about 7 - 10 minutes. This time it has set.

Things I have learnt: That testing for set on a backing hot summer day by waving a spoon about is not going to give an accurate result, mainly because the sun will bake the jam onto the spoon before the jam has time to run off.
That jam is easy to make: if it doesn't set and stays runny just pop it back into the pan and give it another boil through. Even if there is a time gap of several days this still seems to work.
That I am pleased that I have taken another step towards wild foody-ing!

Tomato Chutneying

This is posted on request from Val up in the Charente. In compliance with Foody-ing, whereby all recipes have to be simple, this is simplicity itself, and helped rearrange my thinking about chutneys after a lifetime of avoiding them, in particular the home made variety which always looked like brown sludge to me and mostly tasted the same.

This is 'borrowed' from 'Jams, Preserves and Chutneys' by Marguerite Patten, ISBN number 1-902304-72-1.

1) 2lb (900g) Tomatoes, redly ripe: First task is to peel them: Put them in a large bowl. Cover with boiling water. Leave for ten minutes or so. Pick one up. With a sharpish knife make a couple of vertical slices skin-deep from top to bottom. The skin can then be peeled off quite easily. Remove the inner core if it looks hard and unfriendly, and anything else about the tomato which doesn't look quite right to you.

All of this task I did over the saucepan I was going to cook the chutney in. Not having a preserving pan at this time, I use a large stainless steel saucepan which does the job very well. By prepping the tomatoes over the saucepan rather than over a cutting board or somesuch very drop of juice falls into the pan, hence no waste!

Chomp the toms into smaller pieces, again in your hands. It goes without saying that you should be careful not to cut yourself with the knife if you are using one! I just plunged my hands into the tomatoes and massaged them into pieces which I found to be quite a pleasant experience!

2) 1lb (450g)Apples- this is weight after preparation: The recipe says cooking apples, but I can't get them here in France, so I used Granny Smiths, which stayed firm during cooking.

Peel and core the apples, then cube them. The recipe also says you can grate them, but I haven't tried doing that yet. I suppose that by grating them the chutney would turn out to be finer in texture. But I avoid my grater if at all possible because of my tendency to grate my fingernails off as well!

3) 1lb (450g) Onions: Peeled and sliced. Here the recipe mentions that the onions should be 'finely sliced' but that requires more effort on my part so I get them down to quite a fine dice, then stop.

4) 3/4 pint (450ml) malt or wine vinegar: We can't get malt vinegar here, so red wine vinegar had to suffice.

5) All the above now into your pot. Onto the heat. Get the mix heated up, then simmer until the ingredients are cooked to your liking. I never over cook things, well not intentionally that is (and this only when I get diverted by other activities which come along to distract me) so I cooked the mix for about ten minutes.

To stop it from reducing, I covered the pot with a saucepan lid. I don't know if you should or shouldn't do that, but with my tendency to wander off to do other things, having a lid on helps stop whatever is in the saucepan from boiling dry. This works most times.

6) Now add:
1/2 to 1 teaspoon of ground ginger.
1/2 to 1 teaspoon of mixed spice. Didn't have this, so used Allspice instead.
12 oz (350g) sugar. Any sort I think will do. Might try brown next time.
10oz (300g) sultanas (seedless light raisins).
Salt and pepper to taste.

7) Stirring everything in the pot, making sure the sugar dissoves, bring to the boil. Then simmer 'to the consistency of a thick jam'. A bit daunting this on the first chutney run, as I am used to trying to get things to reach setting point. You don't do this with chutney apparently, so I just kept stirring occassionally until the mix dragged the long handled spoon I was stirring it with. It didn't take long, about five minutes or so. I would think you could get any consistency you like depending on how long you are going to keep it cooking for: the longer you cook the drier will be the chutney.

8) Meanwhile, you can get your jam jars ready. There are various ways of prepping jars, but since I am living in a caravan at the moment and facilities are to more than somewhat basic, all I do is put the jars into a large bowl, pour boiling water into them, then into the bowl. When I need to start filling the jars, I take one out, wipe it dry inside and out, carefully because the glass is hot, then I fill it. Perhaps when I actually do have a proper kitchen I might prep the jars better, but this has to do at the moment.

9) 'Spoon into jars and seal down': I used a jug to pour the mix into the jars, then sealed the tops of the jars with jam jar covers, putting the lid of the jar on top of that. Presumable if you don't have a lid the jam jar cover will do. Also, I remember reading somewhere that you can't use metal lids because the vinegar in the recipe will rust the lid.

10) All done! Now all you have to do is clear up the mess, and leave your newly made chutney alone for a month. This I found hard to do, so I spooned my way through one pot, donated one pot to a dear lady who gave me a dead chicken to cook, then put the others away so I couldn't see them. This chutney is more-ish. I hope you find it the same.


And donating you a pot: The large pieces are the sultanas, and the colour is golden brown, not sludgy!

I read somewhere else that if you are going to give samples of your chutney, jams, etc, away to friends, then to make sure that you actually do keep some of what you have produced for yourself it is a good idea to fill small pots for your friends, and large pots for you. This I did. They are glass yoghurt pots, and work wonderfully well.