Posts filed under 'Preserving'
Paola and I went walking again yesterday afternoon and the plums that excited us two weeks ago were still bent with the weight of plums. We filled every pocket, our shirttails, Paola’s hood and staggered home saying, “Next time we carry baskets and take a mule.”
Wild Plums
I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them this morning, especially when I’d promised myself to accept tomatoes from Amelia and make some sauce for the freezer, but after I dumped them into this gigantic copper tray they looked so beautiful I decided to prepare half of them today and the rest tomorrow. The largest of these plums is little more than one inch across.
They are growing so thickly on the branches that they look like bunches of grapes.
Grappola di susine
The colors excite me, the gentle frosting and occasional gleam of a rubbed cheek — what can be more gorgeous? These I will cut in half, pit and freeze in a light 50% sugar syrup. This winter they may become plum cobbler of plum cake or perhaps something more elaborate I haven’t even thought of yet.
And here they are, washed, pitted and ready to pack for freezing. I listened to economic news on the television while I worked and felt very happy that I had been offered these fruits just for a half a mile hike along the road. I’m lucky.
September 23rd, 2008
This is an experiment. These are three kinds of wild plums which I have pitted, covered in strong alcohol and then a long-cooked heavy syrup with spices. I don’t know what it will become over time, but here is a photo showing you how it all began.
I hadn’t planned to photograph it, but I became enraptured by the irregular glitter of the morning sun on the glass. It looks smooth until you see the way the light dances on it. It made me notice the forms and colors of the plums and go get the camera.
That’s a lot of pleasure from something Paola and I found on our Sunday morning walk and stuffed into our pockets!
September 3rd, 2008
Maybe not, but it feels that way. I have never seen them for sale anywhere in the whole country. To have them I have to get the right cucumber seeds from Germany, dill seeds from wherever — these are a gift from Canada — and grow them. I had a hard time getting the large number of cucumbers and the dill seedheads at the same time. The cucumbers slowed down when the dill was just blooming.
Once you get those things out of the way, however, the pickles are dead easy. What you see is a big jar of dilled cucumber pickles, and another jar of pickled green tomatoes, because they were there and the cucumbers weren’t.
Pickling, like jams and salting, is safe to do. You might occasionally lose a jar of product but you can’t kill anyone like you can with some kinds of canning. I find that reassuring and inspiring.
Kosher Dill Pickles
smallish cucumbers up to 4″ long
peeled garlic cloves — 2 per jar
chili pepper — 1 per jar
dill heads — 2 per jar
grape leaves or a piece of alum the size of a grape (I don’t even know the Italian word for alum and I do have grapevines, so that’s what I used.)
Brine:
250 ml (1 cup) apple cider vinegar
500 ml (2 cups) water
1 tablespoon or soupspoon of coarse salt — do not use table salt!
Wash and trim the cucumbers, then soak them in cold water overnight.
Mix the brine and bring it to a boil in an acid proof pot.
Clean very well and sterilize the number of jars and lids you need. Take one out and pack the garlic, the chili, the dill and the cucumbers in it as tightly as you can. Add the grape leaf or alum, then using a funnel, pour the hot brine over it all until the jar is full. Screw the lid down onto the jar and leave it upside down on a towel on the counter to cool. They’ll be ready to eat in a couple of weeks.
If you use tomatoes, I think you need to cut them in half lengthwise for the flavor to penetrate. The rest is exactly the same. I would happily also pickle celery chunks, blanched cauliflower, carrot or lots of things, but how many pickles can I really use? I am thinking of making my grandmother’s mustard pickles which were my real favorite as a kid. It all depends on the cucumber vines now.
September 2nd, 2008
That’s a fat tablespoon of this:
This is the most powerful thing I have made this year. I found the original idea in a preserving magazine, where it claimed to be a substitute for commercial vegetable broth cubes, but when I read their list of ingredients, I was convinced it would taste of nothing but sage. I really like sage, but my sage is strong and resinous and it can overwhelm almost any other herb I use it with. So I juggled the list and made the flavors my own.
The instructions said not to use it for ten days, but to me it seemed usable immediately, so I distributed samples to various cooks I know and asked them to test it, using it anywhere they might have used salt or also vegetable broth. All the cooks I asked are competent family cooks with no training. They all promised to get back to me with results.
The reports were rewarding. They’d used it in dishes from tomato sauce to roast pigeon and loved the results every time. More, more, was all I heard, and I honestly wish it were legal for me to make it and sell it, because I think I really could. Instead I plan to make as much as my herb garden can provide and give it away as gifts.
The preservation technique used here is salting. Salting is not used very often in western cookery other than with meats and fish. Some pickles could be said to be salted, sauerkraut is salted and there are a few other pickled items that are salted but found only in certain ethnic kitchens. Once upon a time, however, salting was as important as drying. In places where the climate didn’t offer enough sunny, dry weather following the harvest, what else could one do? You can’t dry herbs in a rainstorm. Salting creates an atmosphere in which bacteria cannot thrive, the same thing that drying does. Instructions are not to put it into the refrigerator but to keep it in that ubiquitous dark and cool space. I think that is probably to avoid mold, because there are molds adapted to every condition, including the ocean which is salty and cold.
Many recipes for preserving herbs and flavorings here in Italy are sott’olio, or under oil. It makes for a great product, but is extremely dangerous because of the possibility of botulism. I feel that using oil for preserving needs to be left to commercial enterprises that have the equipment and science to be sure botulin can’t be produced. This salting technique I feel very confident about.
Perfumed Salt
Ingredients list:
Weigh the herbs stems and all, because you use all but the rosemary stems in the melange. Don’t worry, it works.
7 ounces onion, peeled
5.25 ounces carrot, peeled
3.5 ounces celery including leaves
1.75 ounces parsley
.75 ounce sage
.75 ounce rosemary, weighed before removing the leaves from the stems
.75 ounce thyme
.35 ounce oregano or marjoram
.35 ounce basil
.25 ounce peppercorns, freshly ground over the composition
8.5 ounces salt – it’s best to use sea salt, Kosher salt or pickling salt to avoid the powder used to keep salt from clumping.
Wash well and sterilize a couple of sealable jars to keep the mixture in.
You can make this melange two ways. The way you see it here is done by stages in a food processor. Starting with the vegetables I minced and scraped until they were very finely minced. I then added the thyme and rosemary and then one by one, the rest of the herbs until they were all in the food processor and all ground up. I then added the salt and pulsed and scraped to mix it all together. The melange is then removed to a bowl to do its preserving thing. The result is smooth, green and not very pretty.
Another way to do it is to mince everything separately by hand, or to mince each ingredient by food processor using the pulse feature to reduce it to small bits, and then assembling all the parts by hand. That is much more attractive and I will try it that way as soon as my thyme recovers enough to make another batch. Then put it into a bowl and stir in the salt. It will be much more attractive, but there will be some twiggy pieces here and there. That’s why it is better looking. The rest will be the same.
If you watch this once the salt is in, you will see the ingredients start to produce water. That’s good. Then it starts to reabsorb the water and when it is all reabsorbed, thus exchanging flavors from one item to the other, it’s ready to pack up.
Using a scrupulously clean wooden spoon, pack the melange into the sterile jars, pushing down and then slapping the jar smartly with your hand, which will help settle it and prevent the formation of air bubbles. Fill the two jars and cap them, leave them for ten days, then start using them in the same quantity as you would use salt in any recipe you choose.
To use it as vegetable broth, boil a tablespoon of it a couple of minutes in a half pint or so of water. You may want to strain it if you’ve rough chopped your version. Always remember that this is very salty. Don’t overdo it.
Here are some ways we have used it:
Rubbed onto chicken pieces before roasting them
Stirred into the oil in which meat was fried, then cooked with a bit of wine or water to make a sauce
Rubbed onto pigeons for roasting
To replace all the salt in Pomorola, or plain tomato sauce
Stirred into the butter in which zucchini was being cooked
Stirred into chicken gravy in place of salt
Rubbed onto beefsteak before grilling
Stirred into hot vegetable soup instead of salt
The originators suggest that it is good for seasoning scrambled eggs, and that sounds good to me.
Keep this on the pantry shelf in the dark among the spices and seasonings. I have had this in my kitchen for a while now, and every time I open the jar, the kitchen fills with a delicious smell of no particular thing, just goodness.
I am planning to go to a shop I know which sells adorable little ceramic topped mini canning jars. That will be a stocking stuffer gift or a little extra hostess gift for the Christmas season. It has been welcomed so enthusiastically here that half my batch of more than a pound is already gone and I don’t yet have enough thyme to make another. It takes a lot of thyme to add up to .75 ounce, even with the stems!
If I had to buy the herbs to make this, I would. As a matter of fact, I am going to have to buy some herbs if I make as much as I plan to. It’s worth it. I don’t plan to use it in every dish, but whenever I make something that calls for vegetable broth or something that has no particular required seasoning, this little composition will add a sparkle of Italy to my plate.
You too can play with this list as long as you don’t alter very much the proportions of wet items to salt. If you hate one of those herbs, use a different one in the same weight ratio. Or if you aren’t sure, make half the recipe and try it out first. Hurry up, though, because the season for tender herbs is leaving us soon. Let’s get them into a jar before summer and her basil run away!
August 29th, 2008
plum fig geranium
Figs are finished until September brings a second crop, if we are lucky. That’s why I was in a rush to make some Caramelized Fig and Lemon Conserve. That’s the big jar in the middle of the chorus line. I serve it with variously aged or not Pecorino cheeses as either an antipasto or sometimes dessert at home. It’s a slightly bitter sophisticated taste and not at all what some expect if you call it fig jam. It ain’t.
You can make any amount that makes sense to you by just dividing or multiplying the quantities below, but considering the length of time it cooks, it probably doesn’t make sense unless you are making at least a pound or half kilo of figs, because it would otherwise use too much fuel. Or, you could freeze the figs now and make the conserve when your wood stove or your oven are on more often. Recipes and more photos after the jump.
Caramelized Fig and Lemon Conserve
1 kilo or 2 pounds ripe figs, halved or quartered
4 lemons, thinly sliced
.5 kilo or 1 pound sugar
Put these all into a heavy pan and bring it slowly to a simmer. Set the heat the lowest possible, or even use a flame tamer. Cook for at least a couple of hours, checking back and stirring once in a while, until it is caramelized and has altered both color and flavor.
Scrape the conserve into sterilized jars and top with sterilized lids. Before lidding, hold the jar with one oven-gloved hand, and slap it smartly with the other in hopes of eliminating air bubbles within. I can never make it perfectly, but frankly, this doesn’t usually last long enough for that to be much of a problem.
The year of the plum
That’s the jar in the front, closest to you. This has been the year of the plum in Umbria. Trees are bearing plums that have never borne plums before. I may have been here only 7 1/2 years, but my neighbors have been here almost 50 years, and they didn’t know those were plum trees, either.
The year of the plum has meant that this is the year of no cherries and few grapes. The vintage will be poor in quantity this year, although it could still be high quality. You cannot know until we are closer to vintage time of mid-September.
But plums we surely have! The little yellow plum tree I planted from a pit 7 years ago became so loaded with fruit it fell over. As soon as all the fruit is picked we have to top three of its trunks. I’ve frozen so many plums I can’t even estimate how many, and I’ve made jam twice — once for the neighbors and once for me. I make desserts from or freeze the prettier ones, and make jam of the ones with scars. All my fruit is organic, so it tends to be smaller and much less perfect than what I could buy in a supermarket. Wasps like to sting the ripe plums and make some of the juice ooze onto the skin where they can get it. The plum then forms a crystal clear bead or a little dark spot and gets on with ripening.
The frozen plums will wait for the occasion to make this plum cake, or a tart, a crisp, a crumble or a cobbler. I’ve already made the plum cake twice using fresh ones from my blue plum tree. I have to make another to swap with a neighbor down the road for some of his prune plums.
The easiest thing of all, however, is the jam, and you can accomplish it while watching a TV show or reading a book, because other than a few stirs and the bottling time, it almost makes itself.
Spiced Plum Jam
1 kilo or 2.2 pounds plums, pits removed
.5 kilo or 1.1 pound sugar
1 cinnamon stick
4 whole cloves
a few scrapings of nutmeg
Before you do anything about the jam, get glass jars and lids ready, by which I mean wash them really well, and then put them into a big pot completely covered with water and boil them. They must reach the boil and boil ten minutes before they are used to jar the jam. This sterilizing normally take about 30 minutes longer than the jam takes to make. You will also need a wide-mouthed funnel, tongs and a ladle. Mine are all metal and get boiled with the jars. I also place a doubled clean dish towel on the counter near the cooker so that I have a safe and soft spot to work with the hot glasses and lids. Set it up and walk away and let it do its thing.
Put the pitted plums into a heavy pot that is at least 4 times bigger than the mass of the plums. Heat them slowly and then simmer until they look cooked and start to shed their skins, about 10-15 minutes. Pour them into a large-holed sieve or colander and use a rubber spatula to press the flesh through while leaving the skins behind. You should end up with just a small amount of dryish skins remaining. This can be done even more easily using a simple manual food mill.
Return the plum flesh to the same pot as before, add the sugar and the spices and stir in. Heat to a full, rolling boil– a boil that you cannot stir down. Cook at full boil for twenty minutes. The jam is done.
One at a time, use the tongs to remove and drain a jar, then using the funnel and ladle, fill the jar within 1/4″ or a scarce centimeter of the top. Using a dampened paper towel, clean the edge of the jar, then grab a lid with the tongs and screw it on just to snug. Turn the jar upside down on the towel to one side. Obviously, you need either mitts or hotpads to handle these hot babies! When the jam is all bottled properly, there may be a bit leftover. Spoon it down. Gnam! After 5 minutes, turn the jars right side up, and tighten the lids down well.
Jams are often used in Italy to make crostata. They make a sweetish pasta frolla, spread the jam over it, top with a lattice crust of the frolla and then bake it. It lasts forever. Never goes stale. I rarely like it. I am therefore trying to convince my cooking neighbors not to make jam of all the fruit, but to freeze some of it. I have translated some US and UK recipes to show what other people do with fruit and they sound somewhat convinced. Sort of. I think almost any of the desserts I know would be healthier than a crostata! One third sugar and the fruit is cooked twice? How nutritionally sound is that? In comparison a fruit cobbler is health food.
August 25th, 2008
This is elderberry vinegar. It is probably the prettiest thing I have made so far this year, and I like it, too. It’s about as sweet as balsamic vinegar that you buy in a shop; not the real, expensive twenty-year-old stuff, but the stuff most of us can afford to use. If you add the sugar bit-by-bit, you’ll be able to fine tune it to suit your taste.
I am using it, and plan to experiment further, like I would use any flavor enhancer like Worcestershire Sauce or Heinz A-1 Sauce. I add a few drops, a teaspoonful, a tablespoonful — depending on the dish — taste and then maybe add some more. It seems to perk up the flavors that are already in the dish. I think it will help set apart even more some of the dishes I cook for clients.
Obviously, I am not going to use it in every dish or I would chance them all tasting the same, but so far I have liked it in chicken gravy, stirred into the oil for a sauce after sautéing meat, added to the oil when dressing a cooked vegetable for the table. I don’t like sweetened vinegars on salads, but if you do, obviously that’s a good way to use it. Click the blue for more, more
Elderberries grow wild and are free to the picker. The season is right now. Take a jaunt into the countryside and look for huge bushes with bunches of tiny berries hanging off them that look like purple showerheads.
That photo comes from an interesting site called New Being Nutrition where you can also find out what else there is to say of sambucus nigra. Of course in Italy they famously make Sambuca from Sambuco. I used to have a poster in my US office promoting Sambuca which showed a triumphant Julius Caesar with the legend, “After a hard day at war, Caesar did not return home to a salad.”
Scrounge around for some ripe elderberries and try this sweet and sour, deeply fruity flavored condiment.
Elderberry Vinegar
700 g / 1-1/2 pound cleaned and washed elderberries
600 ml / 2-1/2 cups white vinegar — I used white wine vinegar which is the cheapest you can buy here
450 g / 1 pound sugar
To clean the elderberries you need only give them a little shower, then holding the bunch in your hand, use the fingers of the other hand to gently pull the small berries off, letting them fall into a big pot. Once they are all in there, cover the berries with cold water. Bring it to a boil and then reduce the heat and simmer for twenty minutes. Turn off the heat and let them cool naturally.
Do be careful handling the berries and the juice, because they stain and dye very effectively. I stained a bright red dress with a deeper red stain last week.
Strain the juice off. There should be about 300 ml, or ten ounces. Put the juice, the vinegar and most of the sugar into a pot and heat gently, stirring. When it comes to a boil, taste, then add sugar to your taste, then cut to a simmer and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes, until the vinegar become syrupy and clings to a spoon.
Use a funnel to pour it into clean bottles and seal or cork them. It makes about 5 cups and will last a very long time. Actually no one knows how long it will last, because no one has ever had it around long enough. Maybe it is permanent? Maybe I should be putting this on my face?
August 24th, 2008
I read Manolo because I am not yet tired of people who refer to themselves in the third person. Every week he posts what he is reading, doing, thinking, whatever. I never read it. But the idea is appealing.
What I am doing is preserving the absolutely insane amount of fruit and produce of this season. I plan to drag some exemplary products outside eventually and photograph them. Most of what I am doing is not plain vanilla preserving because I need to amuse myself, but a quirk here and a tug there and it is something different. I am using 4 Italian magazines on the subject and 2 English books. The variety of what you can do is astounding, and even if you take away all the things for which I do not have the ingredients, the equipment or the containers, it is still more than I will probably do in all my life.
So whatever Manolo is doing, Umbria is putting it up for the winter.
August 22nd, 2008
The peach mostarda from this summer: you must break open the chilies before cooking, enough to release the flavor. Just crack them before putting them into the peaches.
Smoked pecorino from Sardegna: it is not called Fiore Sardo. The website where I got that information is incorrect. Fiore Sardo is a great cheese, but not smoked. Ask for smoked Sardegnan (Sardinian) pecorino, or Pecorino affumicato Sardo. I just bought 700 grams of it at the Mercato Centrale at Florence, so now I can try to copy some of the recipes I ate at Terra Terra.
The sloppy dough bread was made twice. Both times were different. The secrets seem to be 1) making it wetter than regular bread dough, 2) allowing it to rise very slowly, cool, many hours and 3) cooking the bread in a heavy, covered pot for the first half hour, then uncovering it to finish. Rather than translate the recipe measures, I just used Italian measures, because the yeast comes in packets that raise 500 grams of flour. Both versions worked, and that’s the important part.
I am off to a town near Rome today for an expat gathering, and will post something new when I get back… so see you later.
October 20th, 2007
This week past Olga and Ivano started to can tomatoes. I thought you might like to see how they do it, since it’s done here as it was done in 1900 or earlier, and it is vital to their well-being. For Ivano a meal without tomatoes is only a snack. I’ve cooked French cuisine for him to have him say, “It was very good, but it would be better with tomatoes.”
The gather the tomatoes for a while and keep them in their “fondo” or ground floor do-everything room. The tomatoes get sweeter and sweeter for the wait.
After a dip into boiling water, they’re skinned and put whole into sterile bottles with salt.
The big oil barrel is rolled out and placed on a trivet. The bottles are laid inside, it’s filled with cold water and Ivano builds a fire under it.
Here’s what it looks like when it’s full. My legs were scorching from the fire burning hotter and hotter.
After about an hour and a half, they’re done and they are taken out and Olga tests to be sure they’re sealed They go onto the shelves in the fondo and wait for winter. It takes several days to put by enough tomatoes to make Ivano happy.
As I walked back home I saw that instead of cluttering the garage with them, they’ve used a place under the scaffolding to cure the onions this year. That can’t be all of them. Even tomato lovers use more onions than that.
August 20th, 2007
Notice! Important correction to the ingredients
If you’ve already had all you want, move along, there’s nothing here to see. But I have just started making this year’s mostarda and after some further study I’ve slightly altered the recipe and taken some photos. Clicking on the photos should take you to a full-sized version.
Why post it again? Because this is turning out to be the most requested recipe of all so far. I haven’t served it to anyone who hasn’t just loved it.
This is what it looks like ready to cook. The peaches have been peeled by dunking them into boiling water for 30 seconds and then into a bowl of cold water, after which the skins slip right off. I then remove any imperfection revealed.
Here’s the new recipe:
1.3 kilos (46 ounces) of ripe peaches, which when peeled and stoned will be close to 1 kilo of fruit– cut into chunks
.5 kilo sugar (1 pound)
5 dried red chili peppers (peperoncini) broken in two
1/3 to 1/2 cup of cider vinegar (80-120 ml aceto di mele)
pinch of salt
1 packet of pectin for making jams
Clean and boil at least five sealable canning jars and lids as well as a ladle, tongs and a funnel if you have one. I finally found a wide mouthed funnel, and it’s copper! Lovely. I had always had to make a jury-rigged funnel out of aluminum foil.
Put all the ingredients except the vinegar into a heavy cooking pot with plenty of extra space for boiling, and it will look like the photo above. Stir in the vinegar until it tastes the way you would like it to. I find it depends on the peaches. Very sweet ones need more.
Bring the mixture, stirring all the time, to a boil that is so vigorous that you can’t flatten it by stirring it. Reduce the heat to keep it just at that boiling point, and stir once in a while, for five minutes.
This is the mostarda cooking and just ready to start boiling.
Arrange a clean kitchen towel on a nearby work counter and one by one, remove a sterile jar, drain it, fill it using the funnel and making sure to include a chili, wipe the jar rim with a damp paper towel, and screw the lid on until just closed. When they’re all filled, remove any extra jars from the sterilizing pot and using tongs, put the filled jars into the pot. Boil them for five minutes. Using tongs again, remove the filled jars and with two pot holders, screw the lids down as tight as you can, then leave the jars upside down to cool for a few minutes. Up-right the jars and let them cool completely. You should hear “pop-pop-pop” sounds as the lids seal and form a vacuum. Any that don’t should be refrigerated until use.
Let them sit at least 2 weeks to get the proper flavor and then you can open one, spoon into a dish and drizzle balsamic vinegar over it. Eat with a good aged cheese– aged pecorino is what we like here, but I can’t imagine that any mature cheese wouldn’t be good. It’s eaten with a fork and knife without bread or crackers.
August 3rd, 2007
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