A Taste of Summer – strawberry and lavender jam

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Kate Watson

The last of the Scottish strawberries are in the shops right now, at bargain prices. I saw some yesterday and couldn’t help myself – jam making was really not on my list of things to do this weekend (which is dedicated to sitting in a field listening to folk music!) but my timing is impeccable as usual – and they won’t be there next week. So, 2kg of fresh ripe strawberries came home with me. My garden is full of lavender, so the match was too good to ignore. Why make something that you can buy anywhere, when you can make something really special and a bit unique just as easily?

To make this jam, you will require –

2kg of fresh ripe strawberries
Two dozen (freshly picked!) lavender flowers. You could substitute dry lavender, the quantity will be a matter of guesswork though!
Juice of two lemons and one orange. Also some of the grated zest if you wish.
About 700g of sugar (I prefer unrefined golden sugar)
Pectin (optional – but will improve the set)
A large mixing bowl, big enough to contain all your fruit
Large saucepan
Enough jars to contain your jam

Ideally, start this in the evening before you want to cook your jam. If you haven’t got the luxury of time, though, starting four hours or so ahead will still make a big difference.

Wash and prepare your strawberries, removing the little green ‘hat’ (I use a finger nail to dig these out – but the tip of a knife or the point of a potato peeler do very well) and halving or quartering to a consistent sized piece. You can leave the smallest fruits whole. Layer these in a large bowl, sprinkling sugar over each layer as you go. Every couple of layers add a few sprigs of your lavender, you’re aiming to add about half of them to the bowl at this stage.

Carry on until you’ve added all the strawberries, about a dozen lavender sprigs, and nearly all the sugar (hold a few tablespoons back if you’re planning on using pectin powder). Squeeze your lemons and orange and add the juice to the bowl. Grate some lemon zest, too, if you fancy it. Then cover your bowl with cling film and place it in the fridge overnight (or at least for a few hours) to macerate.

After a few hours you can see the sugar has already started drawing liquid from the fruit, and is essentially all dissolved. Our aim here is to somewhat dehydrate the strawberries, increasing the chance of them holding together through the jam-making process rather than collapsing into mush, while providing ourselves with a cooking liquor without having to add liquid, which would ‘water down’ the flavour of the finished jam.

By morning, this syrup will cover the strawberries. Just on it’s own, this would make a gorgeous desert, with ice cream and perhaps some meringue?

Before you start to cook your jam, prepare all your jars. I sterilise my jam jars by running them through the dishwasher for a good wash (you could wash by hand instead) before placing the jars and lids in a cold oven and bringing it up to 150C.

For this batch of jam I was using a few small kilner-type jars for giving as gifts, as well as some from my usual recycled stock for personal consumption! The little kilner jars were disassembled for washing, and then put back together before sterilising in the oven.

Once your jam jars are all ready in the oven, it’s time to start cooking the jam. Pour all the strawberries and syrup into a generously sized pan (avoid aluminium – my ‘jam pan’ is stainless steel, and is actually a big stock pot, one of these days I’ll get my hands on a lovely traditional copper preserving pan, but that day hasn’t come yet!).

Fish out the sprigs of lavender that have been marinading in the syrup overnight, and throw these away. Add your pectin powder, if you’re using it. It helps to combine it well with a few tablespoons of sugar first, as this will help it dissolve evenly in the jam and not form clumps. I only had one sachet of pectin in the cupboard, which was a bit under half the recommended amount for the batch size, but decided to chuck it in anyway. Strawberries are notoriously poor in pectin and if you’re going to use extra (or preserving sugar, to which it’s already added – often also with some citric acid) this is the jam to do it with.

Now, go and cut another dozen lavender flowers, and tie them together with string in a little posy like a bouquet garni. If you’re not using fresh lavender, you’ll want to tie a couple of teaspoons of dried lavender flowers in a muslin bag – or I tend to use a tea ball. Using fresh flowers rather than dry sprigs will greatly increase the chance the flower heads will stay attached to the stem, rather than breaking off and floating around in your jam.

Add your bunch of lavender to your strawberries in the pan and bring the mix up to the boil, making sure all the sugar is fully dissolved. I simmered mine gently for about ten minutes before brining the heat up to get a hard rolling boil. How long you leave your lavender in is to some degree a matter of personal taste – and tasting is exactly what you need to be doing here! I took my bunch out after the initial simmer, but then decided I didn’t have the flavour I wanted and threw it back in for another ten minutes or so of the hard boil.

Stir gently, trying to avoid breaking up the strawberries any more than necessary. Now you’re trying to find the setting point, which you’re expecting to start to arrive after about ten to fifteen minutes of hard rolling boil. Use your preferred method (mine is usually the cold-saucer approach), there’s a useful little ‘how to’ here. As I mentioned, strawberry jam can be difficult to set without additional pectin, and I was struggling to get a set – rather than risk over-boiling my jam and ruining the fresh flavour, colour and texture of the strawberries, I decided to go ahead and bottle, expecting I would get a jam that would come out of the jar with a spoon, rather than a knife… not going to win any prizes at the show with these, but these are the crosses we bear!

Once you’re happy that your jam has reached setting point – or not! – pour it boiling hot into the piping hot sterilised jars fresh from your oven, and seal the lids down immediately. I don’t feel post-bottling steps are necessary for jams, whose acidity & sugar level should produce really good preserving qualities.

I had a taste on lovely freshly baked bread for breakfast yesterday. It’s a runny jam, but the pieces of whole strawberry give it a really lovely texture. The lavender flavour is clearly perceptible, but subtle and not intrusive. All in all, it’s a really great preserve that I fully intend to make again in years to come (though I may go the whole hog with the pectin to get a set next time) – highly recommended!

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Under Pressure – this elderflower ‘champagne’ is a lively brew!

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Kate Watson

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about making this year’s batch of elderflower champagne, which included my usual warnings (shared with anyone who’ll listen at this time of year!) about the hazards of bottling a rather wild, actively fermenting brew in glass bottles.

Here’s why –

The bottle on the right is the ‘donor’ bottle, containing half a litre of sparkling water. The bottles on the left are my elderflower champagne, about four days after bottling. They were filled, originally, to about 5mm below the neck of the bottle. You can see the pressure in the bottles – despite ‘degassing’ daily up to this point – has inflated the bottle like a balloon (it reminds me of one of those cartoon moon rockets!) creating a whole heap of extra headroom in the process. The bottom of the bottle is also noticeably pushed downwards. Perhaps a passing materials specialist will tell us what internal pressure is required to produce this sort of effect, one of these days!

The little bit of ‘give’ in the plastic has allowed this to happen without catastrophe, which is a luxury that glass doesn’t give you. So please, please, use plastic bottles for elderflower champagne. The reinforced sort that have held fizzy drinks (lemonade, tonic water, or sparkling mineral water, like these), not the sort designed for non-carbonated water or drinks. Yes, I know it looks a bit tatty, but really, why take the risk of a spectacular and dangerous bottle bomb?

And how’s the champagne, you might ask? Why, very nice, thank you! For all the hassle involved, I’m really pleased I just managed to make this year’s batch!

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Last of the Harvest – bonus ‘accidental’ elderflower-infused marmalade

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Kate Watson

Today, I was planning to bottle my elderflower cordial, and make a couple of sourdough loaves for next week. As if that wasn’t enough for a Sunday, we also had a load of rock to collect. So of course, I had to find something *else* that needed doing, too!

After separating the cordial from the fruit and flowers, I was about to chuck them, but suddenly couldn’t bring myself to do it. I could almost hear my grandmother sighing, ‘all that lovely fruit…’ All that lovely fruit – four whole lemons and oranges. It was too good to waste, and had been soaking in a sugar syrup of utter deliciousness for three days, which surely had to be a good thing?

It’s been a very long time since I made marmalade, but there’s a long family tradition of doing it – my Mum makes it every year, and Grandma did, before her. Our ‘family’ marmalade is dark, and rich, and often has hit of whisky or rum in it. This ‘accidental’ marmalade is nothing like it! I dug out Pam Corbin’s ‘Preserves’ (in the River Cottage Handbooks series) and realised neither of her recipes really did what I wanted, but perhaps, by using aspects of both, I could get something sensible!

I sliced my rescued fruit slices up quite finely, removing all the pips. The three days soaking in the sugar syrup had got them some way towards being candied – the skins already a little bit softened and less juice in the flesh than a fresh orange or lemon.

The total weight of sliced up citrus fruit was about 1.3kg (made up of four lemons, and four large sweet oranges), to which I added 2kg of mixed sugar (mostly golden caster & granulated sugars, but with a bit of refined caster sugar to make up the volume) and 1.5l of water. I also gave the big handful of elderflowers a good squeeze to extract the last of their flavour, before throwing these away.

Return all the ingredients into the big pan they’d been steeping in for the cordial, and bring up to a nice simmer, covered, for about an hour until the peels are nice and tender. While this is happening, assemble your jam jars and lids (I ended up with ten, mixed sizes, scavenged from my ‘saved jars’ pile) give them a careful wash, and place them in a cold oven ready for sterilising. I bring mine to 150C and keep them there for ten minutes before I turn the oven off.

When you’re happy with the texture of your citrus peel, take the lid off, turn the heat up, and boil it all as hard as you can for about 15 minutes, until it gets to setting point (I favour the cold saucer approach to checking for set – though interestingly for this particular marmalade there was a dramatic increase in the amount of foam produced as setting point was reached, which was a bit of a give away).

Once you’ve reached a set, take the pan off the heat, and just wait for the bubbles to stop, give it a stir to re-incorporate any froth from the surface, and then ladle into your hot jars fresh from the oven. I’m really messy at ladling, so I love my wide-mouthed jar funnel. Fit the lid tightly, and up-end the jars a couple of times to make sure the boiling hot jam comes into contact with all the surfaces.

If you’re American, at this point in proceedings you’ll probably feel compelled to do something with a water bath. I’m afraid our friends over the Atlantic don’t like this way of filling jars, they seem to regard it with great suspicion as being likely to kill you with botulism or other similar nasties. All I can say is, it’s the only way I, or anyone else in my family, has *ever* filled jam jars, and so far we’ve all lived to tell the tale! (More seriously, this is a nice sweet, acid concoction, and consequently pretty un-friendly to clostridial species, so you should have very little to worry about!)

I’m really pleased with these little beauties! The colour is gorgeous, a real bright rich orange, and the flavour is beautifully balanced. I’d love to say I can taste the elderflower – if it’s there it’s very subtle – but the mix of oranges and lemons gives a really nice clean crisp flavour.

It’s not an overpoweringly bitter marmalade like some of the Seville orange marmalades can be, but instead has a lovely three way balance between the acidity of the citrus flesh, the sugar sweetness, and a bitter note imparted by the pith and peel.

I wish I could offer you a taste – all I can do is encourage you to make your own! I’m so looking forward to this on a lovely thick slice of my fresh sourdough loaf for tomorrow’s breakfast.

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Last of the Harvest – elderflower ‘champagne’

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Kate Watson

Elderflower champagne is one of the tastes of summer for me. It’s quite unlike anything else, and doesn’t keep well, so it’s there, and then it’s gone. This a really feisty brew which breaks all the rules of home-brewing. Please, whatever you do, don’t try and generalise from this brew to any other country wines you might like to make!

For a batch of elderflower champagne, you’ll need the following ingredients and equipment –

30-40 good quality elderflowers (depending on the size of the blooms)
2.5kg of unrefined ‘golden’ granulated or caster sugar
5 lemons (unwaxed if possible, otherwise carefully washed in detergent and rinsed before use)
1 lime (as above)
2 tbsp of white wine or cider vinegar
3 – 4 litres of boiling water, plus extra cold
Wine yeast & nutrient (optional)
Brewing bucket, at least 12l in volume (and a second is very useful – this can double with your spare vessel for the cordial, though!) with lid, or a clean muslin to cover
Enough screw-top plastic fizzy drink bottles to contain your brew (10 – 12 litres in total). Don’t even think about using glass bottles for this brew.

The first rule that gets broken here is sterilisation. I don’t sterilise my buckets for elderflower brews – I figure I’m about to throw half a hedgerow into it, so sterility is a bit moot! But do wash and rinse it very very carefully, and if you have any doubt about contamination from a previous dodgy brew then definitely break out the steriliser!

Put all the sugar in the bucket and add enough boiling water from the kettle to dissolve it fully. Then top the bucket up to about 8l with cold water. The result should be a blood-warm sugar solution.

Peel the zest from the lemons and lime with a potato peeler, as thinly as possible (leaving the bitter white pith behind). Then juice them, and add the zest and juice to the bucket. Add the two tablespoons of vinegar.

Now to the elderflowers. You’ve selected them carefully, so they’re all lovely and full of nectar and pollen. You want to add the flowers – but, unlike the elderflower cordial, you don’t just get to shake the bugs off and throw them in, I’m afraid! This time, you want to add as little of the green stems as you can. There are several ways of doing this. I favour just plucking the flowers off pretty roughly with my fingertips. You could use a fork to ‘comb’ through the little sprigs and pull the flowers off, but you will tend to take quite a lot of fine stem with you. Or you could snip the flowers off with scissors.

The reason for this bit of faff is to do with a nasty bitter flavour that the stems can impart to your brew, which is what will make it undrinkable, eventually, with storage. If you’re planning to drink all your elderflower champagne within a couple of weeks of bottling, you probably needn’t bother, but if you’re hoping to get a month or so of drinking out of them, some of the compounds extracted during brewing from the green stems will eventually be converted (by the yeast? By oxidation? I don’t really know I’m afraid!) into an overpowering bitter note that will make your champagne entirely undrinkable. If you minimise the stem, you should minimise the taint.

Add all your flowers, then, and you should have an amazing smelling bucket full of flowers & citrus peel. Top it up to about 11l. Now add a teaspoon each of yeast and nutrient (if you have some). Traditionally elderflower champagne is allowed to go on it’s own with the wild yeasts that are expected to be present on the flowers. I find this unreliable, and want a good predictable outcome. Loosely cover it with its lid or a double layer of muslin. This is home-brew faux-pas 2 – sorry, no airlock for me!

Signs of fermentation should be evident within a day or so, in the form of bubbles visibly rising to the surface (you may also get a froth, depending on how vigorous your fermentation is). Watch for a bit, you’ll keep missing them and catching just a little movement in your peripheral vision. You may also notice the slightly sharp smell of the carbon dioxide.

Leave your champagne to ferment for about five to seven days. As if we haven’t broken enough rules already, this is where the whole process goes horribly ‘wrong’. We’re going to make no effort to wait until our brew has ‘fermented out’ (see this cider-making post for discussion if you’re interested), so the brew is still actively fermenting, with the yeasts consuming sugars and producing alcohol and carbon dioxide, when it goes into the bottles. This ‘quick and dirty’ short cut allows us to go from flowers-into-bucket to drinkable-brew in about a fortnight, which is quite remarkable. It does however carry a pretty serious risk of producing ‘bottle bombs’ – a quick google for ‘elderflower champagne exploding bottles’ will illustrate how widespread a problem this is.

For this reason, I only use screw-top plastic fizzy drink bottles for my elderflower champagne. Make sure they’re fizzy drink bottles – the 1 litre and half litre bottles seem most ‘stable’ though you can use the 2l cola or lemonade bottles if you like. Don’t use bottles from non-sparkling water or fruit juices. Do sterilise these with home-brew steriliser or milton solution, and rinse carefully before use.

After your brew’s been frothing for a week, filter it through a jelly bag or muslin-lined sieve into the second bucket to remove the solids, and syphon into your bottles (or use a jug and funnel, though this is another breach of ‘protocol’!) and screw the lids down tightly. I was reminded when doing this this year that the filtration process is can be slow and frustrating – the yeast and pollens clog the jelly bag to a remarkable degree – and in future I suspect I’m going to use a much more open filter – I may even experiment with a nylon sieve (the sort you’d use to sift flour for baking) or something similar. Using the jelly bag to filter my ~10kg batch took well over two hours, which frankly I could have done without!

Once your champagne is *finally* in your bottles, put them at room temperature somewhere secure where you can keep an eye on them (I tend to store the filled bottles in the washed and dried brewing buckets).

Every day or so, give the bottles a squeeze. As the brew continues to ferment, the bottles will become harder and harder, and may even start to bulge alarmingly. If you notice this starting to happen, release the pressure by very gently opening the lid a crack to let the carbon dioxide escape. You may need to do this about once a day for the first week or so!

You can see from the photo on the right the extent to which pressure can build up in these bottles – for comparison, the ‘donor’ bottle in it’s original state – the elderflower champagne bottles were filled to just below the neck, and the gas produced has inflated the bottles like balloons, producing a really large volume of extra head-room in the process. Really, folks, don’t risk glass bottles with this brew!

As soon as you have pressure in the bottles, you can start drinking it – though I suggest waiting a week from bottling before taking your first sip. As time goes by, the champagne will become ‘drier’ in flavour, and higher in alcohol as the sugars are consumed. Don’t try to store this brew long-term – once you like the flavour of it, drink it and enjoy it! I find that even with care, after four or five weeks the flavour is starting to deteriorate.

Pour, and enjoy this beautiful ephemeral effervescent flavour of summer!

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Last of the Harvest – home-made elderflower cordial

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Kate Watson

After you’ve picked your elderflowers, it’s time to make some gorgeous drinks with them. Give them a good look over, and sort through. Throw out any browning flowers. Shake out any bugs but do not be tempted to wash them – you’ll wash all the flavour away! You’ll be straining the ‘bits’ out later anyway, so don’t worry about the odd aphid making it through!

These are the ingredients and equipment you’ll need for the elderflower cordial. You can scale these quantities up or down to suit yourself, but when I’ve gone to the effort of harvesting the flowers I can’t see the point in making much less than this at a time. –

About 70 nice elderflowers
6lb (2.7kg) of un-refined ‘golden’ granulated or caster sugar
6 UK pints (3.4l) of boiling water
4 lemons (ideally unwaxed, failing that washed carefully in detergent & rinsed)
4 oranges (likewise)
4oz / 100g of citric acid (get this from a home-brew supplier, or a chemist’s)
Large stainless steel pan or food-grade plastic bucket big enough to hold all the ingredients (if you have a second one of these, this will also come in useful), with lid
Jug, jelly bag / fine strainer and muslin
Enough bottles to hold your cordial – I use recycled screw-top wine bottles, plastic bottles are also fine and you can freeze cordial in them.
Campden tablets / powder (optional – if you’re a wine-maker you probably have these anyway – they’ll allow you to store your cordial for long periods at room temperature, which is very useful!)

Weigh out all your sugar – I know there’s a lot of it, on the plus side you’ll be drinking this watered down so it’s not quite as bad as it looks (hey, who am I kidding?). I’ve seen it asserted you can make this with ‘Splenda’ rather than sugar if you insist, but I haven’t tried it so can’t vouch for the results!

Dissolve your sugar in the boiling water, and add the citric acid. Stir until it’s all fully dissolved. Now wait until it’s cooled down (immersing your pan or bucket carefully in a sink full of cold water can speed this process up greatly).

Slice up your citrus fruit into thick slices (about 1cm thick), and add these to the cool sugar syrup. Then add the elderflowers, one at a time so you can give them a good shake to dislodge any debris or creepy crawlies and discard any substandard flowers.

The smell will be amazing. Steep for two or three days, covered, at room temperature.

Once all the flavours have infused, it’s time to strain and bottle. First, strain the cordial through the jelly bag or sieve lined with a layer of muslin. I was about to discard the fruit with the elderflowers but couldn’t bring myself to do it – instead, I made a batch of ‘accidental’ marmalade, which is really very good!

Check your volume, then crush and add your campden (if using) at the doseage given on the pack – usually 1 tablet per gallon. For me, the ingredients yielded just over a gallon (or 4.5l) of cordial, which was convenient for bottles, at a smidgen over six full wine bottles worth.

Stir well to dissolve, then allow your strained cordial to settle for at least 3 – 4 hours (or overnight) so that some of the sediment that’s survived the filtering – this will mostly be pollen, which is very small – will settle to the bottom of the bucket. If you use a good fine jelly bag, there’ll be very little sediment to worry about.

Sterilise your bottles using home-brew steriliser (or in the oven like jam jars, but if so make sure you let them cool completely before filling – cold liquid into hot bottles is a recipe for disaster!). Then fill them using a jug & funnel – you could use a syphon, and this might reduce your sediment a little, but it seems a lot of faff to me!

With campden, the bottles should store for a long while at room temperature (at least until next year’s elderflowers are ready – though I challenge you to save any that long!). Without, they should keep in the fridge for a month or two, without refrigeration, there’s a significant risk that they start to ferment! If you’re using plastic bottles, you can always stash them in the bottom of the deep freeze – they’ll keep for ages like that.

It looks lovely in a clear glass bottle, like fresh bottled sunshine (and we’ve had precious little of that this year!). My favourite way to enjoy this cordial is with plenty of ice, a slice of lemon or lime, and sparkling water, in a tall glass on a hot summer’s afternoon. But I also cherish it as an amazing taste of summer to remind you of the warmer, brighter days in the depths of a cold damp dark winter!

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Last of the Harvest – finally foraged the elderflowers!

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Kate Watson

I nearly missed this year’s elderflower season! We’ve been having mad weather in the UK this year – a late, cold Spring and then so much rain in the past three months. The elderflowers started late, and then meteorology managed to conspire with work and family commitments to leave me without a warm sunny day to go picking until today. We’ve had a few heavy downpours in the past few days, with another one yesterday evening, and I was a bit worried there would be nothing left for me to pick. A 5 mile, two hour foraging walk around the local lanes and byways eventually yielded the hundred good elderflower heads I needed. They have never been so hard won!

I can’t remember when I started making elderflower cordial – it’s been well over a decade certainly (and before that – elderflower drinks are one of the things I really did learn from my grandmother!). The desire to make my own elderflower champagne a couple of years ago drove the acquisition of my first small set of home-brew equipment – and what a great hobby (or can of worms, depending on your point of view!) that turned out to be. Brewing came before curing and smoking and put me on the path to wanting to learn as much as I could about country skills – and hence, in the end, this blog. So elderflowers and I go way back – they’ve had quite an influence on my life, one way and another!

These days I make a batch each of elderflower cordial and champagne, at the same time. In a good year I’ll do this a couple or three times, but sadly this year it’s a one-shot deal, so I’d better make the best of it! To make both, in the quantities I make, you need about 100 good blooms.

An ideal quality elderflower is one where all the little flower heads are open, the petals pure white with a lovely buttery-yellow bloom of pollen on it. As the blooms age, the pollen (and nectar, and the best of the flavour and scent) dissipates. The flowers then start to appear whiter – still ok to use, but not quite as flavoursome. Then they start to brown. Browning blooms will not contribute the flavour you want, and should not be used. The photo to the left shows great quality blooms at the back, adequate to front left and sub-standard (discard) to the front right. There were too many adequate and poor flowers today – earlier in the flowering season it’s much easier to get nice flowers!

Now you’ve picked your flowers, you’ll want the recipes. Here they are –

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Basic Butchery – how to butcher & portion a pork belly

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Kate Watson

Pork belly is such a wonderful and versatile cut, and so under-rated here in the UK. Most of my bacon making is with belly, so we get through quite a lot of it. As a result I tend to buy it most-of-a-belly at a time! The process of butchering it to remove the ribs and prepare it for curing or roasting is quite simple, and worth learning, since it means you’ll end up with precisely the piece of meat you want for the task at hand, and a couple of little bonus items, too!

Your butcher will probably offer to prepare your belly for you, removing the ribs and trimming it to your preference, but you never quite seem to get exactly what you were after, somehow! Doing the job yourself means you get exactly what you want. This is my starting point – just under 2kg piece of pork belly .

Start by removing the layer of fat on the inside of the belly piece, if there’s one there. You shouldn’t need your knife for this, it should just pull away if you work gently beneath it with your fingers, leaving a clean muscle surface beneath. Once you’ve removed it, set it to one side (I usually keep an ‘offcuts’ plate or bowl handy when I’m portioning or butchering meats). This is effectively pork suet.

Now you can get a better look at the anatomy of your piece of meat. As it’s laid out in the photo here, the ribs are on the left, you can see the flap of diaphragm meat lying above them. On the right side of the belly is a band of smooth muscle. The ends of the ribs lie almost exactly where the visible edge of this muscle joins the diaphragm.

Take a long, thin bladed, sharp knife and first cut beneath the ribs, as close as possible to them to reduce wastage. The piece has been rotated 180 degrees from where it was in the previous photograph so that the ribs are now bottom right. You should be able to feel roughly where the ribs end, so extend your cut beneath them as close as possible to this level.

Now gently slice beneath the strap-like muscle we identified earlier, where it lies over the ends of the ribs, and peel it back, You’ll find the ends of the ribs and the strips of cartilage which link them together. Gently slice around these and then back underneath. By lifting the rib section it should now be quite easy to join up with the cut beneath and remove this as a block.

Either put the rack of ribs to one side, or cut them up into individual ribs at this stage. This couldn’t be simpler – just feel for the gap between each pair of ribs and slice down the centre parallel to them, your knife, if it’s nice and sharp, should cut straight through the connecting cartilage.

You can trim away any strips of cartilage that area easy to identify – you can see this top left. That bit is genuinely wastage, incidentally, so chuck it away if you want! Bag your butchered ribs up, label them, and freeze them for another day (they’re great done on the BBQ with a jerk marinade!).

Now let’s turn our attention back to the pork belly itself.

You can really see now that mine is anything but rectangular! It’s actually sitting ‘upside down’ in terms of how it was on the pig – the top as we look at that photo is the part closest to the middle of the pig’s body, the rib side is towards the back. As we get closer to the abdominal midline, the proportion of fat to muscle increases, so I trimmed the piece to rectangular, discarding the part which is most top-left in this photograph.

Because I’m planning to prepare the belly as streaky bacon, this will give me more manageable, even chunks. You can see the effect of the trimming in this photograph – the piece has been rotated again so the rib-side is now away from us. Add your trimmings to the ‘offcuts’ bowl.

Now simply divide up your belly as you like. Mine weighed almost exactly 1.6kg at this point, so I divided it evenly into four ~400g pieces. A large piece like this would be fantastic roasted slowly whole, too, perhaps with chinese spices, for a special meal for a big gathering! Roast pork belly has the *best* crackling.

Bag your ribs and your offcuts – these will make fantastic quite fatty minced pork for adding to any minced-meat dish that requires extra juiciness and succulence, or for sausages. Then sit back and admire your work.

My belly portions were for curing, so I prepared a maple syrup cure made up of 100g of supracure and 90g of pure maple syrup, applied about half to all the bellies, and then bagged them together in the fridge. (More discussion of the bacon-in-a-bag ‘dry’ cure method can be found here.)

I’ll apply the second half after 48 hours and re-arrange the bellies so they’re skin-side together for the second half of the curing process. The total curing time would normally be 5 days for belly pork, but these pieces are thicker than usual, so I may decide to let them go a day longer, depending on the texture and appearance at the 5 day mark. It would be great to get some maple smoke into some of them – but that’ll depend on the weather. I’ll keep you posted!

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Signs of Summer – if you can believe it!

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Kate Watson

No one in the UK (or probably elsewhere!) can have missed the fact that today marks the peak of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations for Dear Queen Lizzie. It’s June! The British weather is a vexatious, tricky beast at the best of times (why else would we all spend so much time talking about it?), and of course it’s done its thing and provided the cold grey drizzle to put the lie to the gorgeous hot sunny spell we were enjoying not a week ago. But despite all of this (10 degrees centigrade! In June! I ask you?) and the cheerful, if slightly damp collection of people crowded into the village hall this lunchtime for beer, bunting, and a cracking hog roast, I know summer’s here. How?

That’s how! The elderflowers are opening!

Some of you will have some sense of how exciting this is, perhaps. The scent of them is just so glorious, and the excitement starts to build towards the elderflower cordial and champagne brewing that the next few weeks will hopefully bring!

Keep your eyes open for these now, and look forward to a couple of great recipes over the next few weeks! In the meantime, I hope the bad-weather plans in place have allowed everyone with jubilee parties to get a bit of fun, despite the grotty conditions!

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Smoked Trout – so simple, so tasty, and all home-made

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Kate Watson

Smoked trout – like its close cousin smoked salmon – is one of the great ‘luxury’ foods. I find I prefer it – the finished product, while it looks very similar to salmon, has a more delicate flavour with less of the aggressively-fishy oiliness which can characterise smoked salmon. It’s much less readily available, too – and can certainly be expensive, a quick google suggests prices from £40 – £80 a kilo direct from a number of British producers. Expect further mark-up in a smart London delicatessen!

Of course, if I were just writing this in praise of smoked trout and telling you to go and buy some from a smokehouse on the internet, it wouldn’t be the country skills blog! Making smoked trout at home is straightforward, and produces a first-class product which is the match of anything you’ll buy from even the most up-market smokehouse or deli counter. Better still, it costs a fraction of the commercial product. The two fillets of rainbow trout I cured and smoked for this post cost the princely sum of £1.53, with a combined final weight of a little over 200g – including other ingredients and consumables, that’s a total cost of well below £10/kg. A little luxury, then, that we can all afford to enjoy a bit more often!

You’re going to be eating this fish raw, effectively, so freshness is of the essence. Choose a lovely fresh whole trout – with bright clear eyes, red gills and no ‘fishy’ smell – and have it descaled and filleted for you by the fishmonger (or do it yourself – it’s not that tricky really!). Good quality farmed trout is readily available, even on supermarket fish counters, and if you can get hold of a lovely fresh wild fish, even better! Avoid pre-packed fillets, whose freshness it is more difficult to be certain of. Wash the fillets off carefully under the tap, to remove all the mucus coating from the skin. Make sure you’ve removed all the rib bones and pin-bones (the small pointy bones that run along the middle of the fillet) – a pair of tweezers is very useful here. This will take a few minutes, but is worth the effort to do properly. Then rinse the fillets and dry them carefully with kitchen towel. Weigh the fillets and make a note of this weight.

The cure I use for trout and salmon is very simple – made up of 1/3rd sugar (golden caster sugar is my favourite here) and 2/3rd table salt. I favour a short curing time – just overnight – with an excess of dry-cure so that the cure stays saturated throughout. Be generous – you can afford to be, since the ingredient cost is very low – in the scale of pence for a couple of fillets.

You want a thin layer of cure in your non-metallic dish below the fish, and a good coating over the top. The photo gives a good idea of the sort of coating you’re aiming for.

You then want to weigh down the fillets to help draw water out – you’ll need to improvise something – I found a couple of plastic ‘take-away’ containers fitted very nicely in my dish, and then weighed them down with tin cans. Don’t use anything metallic in direct contact with the curing fish. Put the salted fillets in the fridge.

I would tend to get the cure going when I get home from work, having collected my fresh fish on the way home – so just before bed I turn the fillets over in the cure, and replace the weights before putting them back in the refrigerator. The next morning, there will be quite a lot of liquid in the dish and most of the cure will have dissolved. Take the fillets out of the dish, noting the change in texture – the skin will have taken on a harder, almost cardboard character, and the flesh will be firmer and more translucent. Rinse and dry the fillets, and weigh them again, and note down the reduction in weight. My fillets had dropped from a starting weight of 256g to 220g at this stage – a 14% water loss. You’re aiming for a final loss of ~18% by the end of the process, so that’s well on target. Now place the fillets on an open plate, uncovered, in the refrigerator for 24 hours before cold smoking.

You may have read this far, and are now thinking ‘well, that’s no use to me – who has a cold smoker at home?!’. At it’s simplest, cold smoking requires two things – a source of cold smoke (from smouldering sawdust, for instance), and a space in which to contain it. Last year, I built a wooden tower smoker, but there’s no need to start with a construction project. A cardboard box, or a (clean!) upturned bin or barrel, rigged up creatively with a rack or two, will do just as well for the occasional smoking job!

You will need a smoke source, and I can heartily recommend the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator, which is a nifty little gadget which entirely takes any stress or complication out of the process. It’s a little pricey (around £35 at this time), but will pay for itself incredibly quickly once you get the smoking bug! It reliably provides 10 – 12 hours of cold smoke (depending on the temperature, humidity, and your sawdust choice) with very little heat production. Have a look at the Supplier’s List for suggested sources of smoking and curing supplies.

Choose a day without too much wind or rain (the occasional shower isn’t important), and where the temperature is roughly between 5 degrees and 15 degrees centigrade. I’ve successfully smoked between 0 and 5 degrees but smoke penetration is less effective. Colder, and your fish will freeze rather than taking smoke. Warmer and the risk of spoilage increases considerably – though cold smoking temperatures up to about 20 degrees are cited in some places. Get the smoker going first thing in the morning, and leave it for the day – though I would keep it under much closer supervision if using a cardboard box!.

I used a mix of alder and maple sawdust for this smoker burn (about 10% maple) – this produced a gorgeous neutral smoke-flavour with very little bitterness and with a noticeable ‘sweet’ note, presumably from the maple. It’s definitely a mix I’ll use again in the future.

Once the smoke generator has burned all the way through, unload your smoker, and take a final weight on your fillets. They should have lost another 4 – 5 %. They will have a lovely orange-pink colour with a noticeable translucency and a glossy surface. Then wrap them tightly in cling film, and freeze them. Smoking fish in this way isn’t really a preserving mechanism, and storage time in the fridge is about 3 – 4 days. Even if I’m going to eat them very soon, though, I tend to freeze them at this stage – a day or two in the freezer should ensure any parasites which may be present in the fish have been killed off. You can keep them frozen for a couple of weeks without too much loss of quality, but after a month or so you’ll start to notice the deterioration.

Once thawed, I slice the smoked trout thinly with a sharp knife, starting at the ‘head’ end of the fillet, at about a 45 degree angle. There’s a bit of a knack to this, but you’ll get good at it really quickly – and who cares if the slices are thicker, or a bit uneven? This produces small, almost translucent slices which are great for nibbles. I love to serve these with water biscuits or oatcakes (or your preferred sort of cracker), cream cheese – or a soft goat’s cheese is also very nice, freshly ground black pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. But the limit is really your imagination. Smoked trout with scrambled eggs on a toasted muffin is a beautifully indulgent breakfast!

I really do hope you chose to give home-smoked trout a try, and that however you prepare and enjoy it, it brings you as much foodie pleasure as it brings me!

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Better than Branded – homemade sun-dried tomato ketchup

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Kate Watson

It’s too early in the year to have a glut of tomatoes, but I wanted to try my hand at home-made tomato ketchup. The commercial offering is so ubiquitous, how many of us pause to think what’s in it, or if we could make it better ourselves? I wondered if using sun-dried tomatoes, the dry-packed sort, might give me a shortcut to a sauce that would pack a real concentrated tomato punch. Well, they do – with the added bonus of not requiring the extended cooking time required to drive excess water off fresh tomatoes.

To make a little over a litre of sun dried tomato ketchup, you will require the following –

250g of dry-packed sun dried tomatoes
Two small to medium sized yellow onions
5 cloves of garlic
Whole red chilli
Red wine vinegar
Balsamic vinegar
Fresh ginger
Soft brown sugar
Ground allspice
A carton of apple juice
Food processor, ideally with blender attachment, or hand-held liquidiser

Put the tomatoes in a bowl and pour over enough freshly boiled water to cover. Roughly chop the onions (or peel, quarter, and chop in the food processor). Mince the garlic. Once the tomatoes have been soaking for about half an hour, pour off – but reserve! – the soaking liquid. Roughly chop the tomatoes by hand or put them through the food processor. Also finely chop the whole chilli (it can go through the machine with the tomatoes).

Now put a glug of olive oil (or your preferred cooking oil) in the bottom of a large pan, and then start to fry off the onions, adding the garlic when the onion has gone translucent, but not taken on any colour. Fry until just colouring and then add the chopped tomatoes & chilli, mix together and add the tomato-soaking liquid back in. This liquid will have taken on some lovely flavour from the tomatoes (which is why we’re using it). Note however that dry-packed tomatoes are preserved with salt, so if reducing the amount of salt in your diet is important to you, you should discard this liquid and instead add enough apple juice to allow you to start to stew the tomatoes.

At this stage, the whole process becomes a matter of personal taste. I added about a cm of fresh grated ginger to the pot, along with a quarter of a teaspoon of allspice. I started by adding 50ml of red wine vinegar, a glug of balsamic vinegar, and a tablespoon of soft dark brown sugar. Keep tasting the mix as it cooks, and adjust your seasoning as required.

Once it’s been bubbling away for about twenty minutes, pour the contents of the pan into your blender, or take the pan off the hob and use your handheld blender. Start to liquidise the mix, adding apple juice as you go until you achieve your desired consistency. I stopped short of blending mine completely smooth, because I like it to have a little texture – a sort of hybrid ketchup/salsa feeling. I ended up adding about half a litre of apple juice in total.

Now return your mix to the hob and set it bubbling again. This is the time to make the final adjustments to your flavours. I ended up adding an extra splash of wine vinegar at this stage, along with another half tablespoon of sugar. Remember that you’re tasting the ketchup hot, once it’s cold, most flavours, but particularly vinegar flavours, will be less marked, so if a really sharp vinegar is to your taste, make sure you dial it in now!

Once it’s cooked and seasoned to your satisfaction, pack your ketchup into sterilised jars or bottles while still piping hot, and seal tightly. Old glass salad dressing bottles are great (and will have plasticised lids, which will help protect the metal from the vinegar). I would expect this to keep similarly to chutney, and to have a shelf life of several months in a cool dark place. Keep it in the fridge once opened and eat up reasonably quickly!

Try it – it’s gorgeous, sharp and sweet and packed with concentrated tomato flavour. I tasted it alongside commercial ketchup today and it makes the branded stuff taste like red acidic sugar water. It will make a great burger relish, and goes beautifully with oven baked spicy potato wedges.

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Country Skills for Modern Life

Some of the cool and useful food, craft and sustainability skills that your grandparents knew, but probably didn't teach you!

Category Archives: Preserving

A Taste of Summer – strawberry and lavender jam

Under Pressure – this elderflower ‘champagne’ is a lively brew!

Last of the Harvest – bonus ‘accidental’ elderflower-infused marmalade

Last of the Harvest – elderflower ‘champagne’

Last of the Harvest – home-made elderflower cordial

Last of the Harvest – finally foraged the elderflowers!

Basic Butchery – how to butcher & portion a pork belly

Signs of Summer – if you can believe it!

Smoked Trout – so simple, so tasty, and all home-made

Better than Branded – homemade sun-dried tomato ketchup

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