Category Archives: Preserving

Foraging Skills – how to get ahead!

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I’ve been thinking about foraging recently.  There’s very little quite as special as a lovely – and free! – treat garnered from a hedge.  I’m thinking about a wild mushroom risotto, pots of crab apple jelly, a steaming blackberry crumble or a bubbling demijohn of rosehip wine.  Foraging is really an autumn sport, though, borne from the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, so why am I writing about it now?

The thing that makes a really good forager isn’t being able to spot a laden crab apple tree at three hundred paces  – it’s knowing where that tree is in the first place.  Being a successful forager depends on keeping your eyes open all year round – if you notice things now, and remember them, you’re well on target for a bumper summer and autumn foraging season.

So just now, keep your eyes open for these, and make a mental note –

Hazel catkins in hedge

They’re hazel catkins, and where they’re hanging in profusion from the naked branches of hedges and shrubby trees now, there should be some lovely cob nuts in the autumn – they’ll be much harder to see then, when there are leaves on the tree, and hazels growing in mixed planting aren’t especially distinctive looking.  Watch like a hawk though, come autumn, and pick them slightly green and sweet – because the mice will want them too!

A little note on the legality of foraging – if the item is being grown as a crop, then it’s not foraging, it’s scrumping (or stealing!).  It’s very unlikely that cob nuts or blackberries growing in a field hedge are intended as a food crop, but the nuts and sloes in my garden hedge definitely are!  So if it looks like someone’s caring for a tree or a hedge, it’s in an orchard or garden or looks intentionally planted, tread with care!  That said, there at lots of edible crops grown incidentally on trees planted ornamentally, on streets and in council amenity spaces, particularly in urban areas – foraging doesn’t have to be just a country pursuit! – look out for apples, plums and cherries, too!

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Meddlesome creatures – the return of the bletted medlars

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After two and a half week’s bletting in the spare bedroom, about half the medlars looked unchanged, the other half had softened and darkened in colour, with skins that look and felt a bit like nicely ripened passion fruit.

Bletted medlars

I was itching to get on and, in any case, had read in a couple of places that having some un-bletted medlars in the mix would help with setting the jelly, as they are higher in pectins. Brilliant then – time to get going!

Medlars in different stages of blettingFermenting medlarOf course, I had to taste the bletted medlars – I can report they’re a very unattractive mid-brown squishy substance, with a gentle sweet and slightly floral, perfumed flavour.  Not unpleassant but nothing to get really excited about.  One of my medlars had started fermenting, it’s skin was tight with gas and there were bubbles escaping from the calyx (the ‘dog’s bottom’ bit of the fruit).  In the spirit of experimentation (and so you don’t have to!) I did have a little taste of the liquid leaking from this – again not unpleasant, a little more citrussy than the bletted medlar.  I may have to look into medlar wine recipes!  There were also a couple of medlars which were dry and hard and black in the middle.  I threw those ones away.

Bletted medlars on a plateAfter consulting a few different sources (many recommended adding apples to the mix – something I wasn’t keen to do as I really want to see what medlars taste like!) I settled on a very simple recipe – medlars, sugar, and just a squeeze of lemon juice into the stewing water, using my almost-all-purpose fruit jelly recipe.

The liquor that drained from the jelly bag nearly had me giving up in disappointment.  It was distinctly cloudy with a rather insipid pale brown colour, a bit like too-weak milky tea.  A quick taste, and it was quite bland apart from a dominant flavour of tannin – like I’d been boiling up dry leaves and bark for an hour.  It almost went down the sink, but since I wasn’t sure what it was meant to taste like, I decided to persevere.

Medlar jellyThe result is a revelation – dark golden in colour, sweet/acid with a gentle floral top note and a soft tannin base flavour, quite unlike anything else you’ve ever eaten – my husband tried for several minutes to work out what it tasted ‘like’ before giving up on the exercise. The set of my jelly is a bit softer than I would have liked – to my pint and a half of liquor I added a pound of preserving sugar and half a pound of golden caster I had lying around. The jelly had been boiling for well over half an hour at this stage so I suspect the main problem was shortage of pectin from the quite well-bletted medlars.  I don’t think it really matters!

Almost-All-Purpose Any-Fruit Jelly

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Time: about an hour – Patience: 4 or 5 hours – Difficulty: easy

Until this year I had never made fruit jellies, out of a misguided belief that the process was needlessly tedious and fiddly – but a bumper crop of crab apples scrumped from a hedge finally forced me to give it a go.  While there’s no escaping that it is a two-stage process – stewing fruit followed by straining and re-boiling with sugar – as hassle goes it’s certainly less trouble than taking stones out of plums for jam! Only the final boil and bottling requires your full attention, otherwise you can be getting on with other things – or putting your feet up with a well deserved cuppa!

Medlar jellies

You will require –

  • Fruit – single or mixed varieties – apples are a popular ‘base’ fruit with additions. A couple of kilos is a sensible quantity to try first time out and will probably make 6 jars or so.
  • Fresh herbs, chillies, spices… the only limit is your imagination
  • Juice of a lemon or orange, if you like
  • Sugar – I usually use preserving sugar for the additional pectin – this is particularly important for soft fruit which contain very little of their own pectins, apples and plums have quite a bit of their own and probably don’t really need supplementing. Still, it can’t hurt, right?
  • A saucepan with a bigger capacity than the volume of your fruit
  • A jelly bag / muslin strainer
  • Jam jars with lids, clean and dry. I like to re-use jam jars if I can, and save small pretty ones for jellies, to the eternal irritation of my husband who keeps finding empty jars all over the house. Jellies often have quite a delicate flavour, so do be careful the jars haven’t previously been used for pickles or curry sauce (give them a good suspicious sniff if in any doubt, and check the lids for staining – if so send them for recycling or use them for chutneys), as this could very easily taint your lovely jelly!

And this is how it’s done –

  • Stewing medlarsRoughly cut your fruit into pieces no more than about an inch square, removing any damaged / rotten areas (ignore this last detail in the case of bletted medlars, or you’ll have no fruit!)
  • Place the fruit in the saucepan and just cover with tap water. Add the citrus juice at this stage if desired.
  • Bring to the boil and then cover and simmer gently for an hour or so, stir from time to time but don’t mash.
  • Straining in the jelly bagSuspend your jelly bag over a bowl and spoon in your stewed fruit. A soup ladle is quite helpful here. A jelly bag is a really useful thing to have if you’re making jellies (who knew?) but can be a bit expensive. You can bodge your own with a tied muslin. Many jelly bags have stands, but I just tie mine to the handles of the eye-level kitchen cabinets.
  • The liquor that drains into the bowl will probably be cloudy. Don’t worry about this too much. You’ll see why in a bit.  Leave it to strain for at least a couple of hours.
  • When the flow of liquor from the jelly bag is almost exhausted, put the clean jam jars and lids in a cold oven and set the temperature to 150.
  • Now, when the dripping is essentially stopped, measure the volume of liquor you have, preferably in pints (please note this recipe uses UK Imperial weights and measures, not US ones).
  • Then weigh out the sugar you need, following the rule of thumb of one pound of sugar to one pint of liquid.
  • Return the liquor and the sugar to the (washed) pan, add any finely shredded herbs or spices (if you just want the flavour but not the pieces of herb or chilli etc in the jelly, you should have added them at the stewing stage so the pieces are filtered out – personally, I rather like the look of little nuggets of flavour in the final product), and bring gently up to the boil, stirring continuously.
  • You now have a pan of quite concentrated boiling sugar syrup, which you should under no circumstances leave unattended. It will probably froth a little and some scum may well rise to the surface. I’ve seen recommendations to skim this but I never bother.
  • At some point during the boiling process, with a bit of luck, the cloudiness will disappear entirely. No, I don’t know why, either. I think it’s that culinary alchemy again!
  • Keep stirring, and check for setting periodically. I put a couple of small saucers in the freezer ahead of time, then put a drop of the boiling syrup on the saucer, it will cool quickly and allow you to check the consistency. It’s ready when the cold jelly wrinkles when you push it with your finger.
  • Different jellies seem to reach setting point at very different rates, some will take as little as 10 minutes, so keep checking regularly. And tasting, of course.
  • Once your jelly has reached setting point, carefully get the hot sterilised jam jars out of the oven, fill with the hot jelly and tighten the lids fully. If you have any pieces in the jelly, watch to see if they’re trying to sink or float in the jars – if they are, then invert the jars every so often as they cool to mix the contents.
  • If you find, once they’re cold, that the jelly isn’t as set as you’d like, it’s perfectly alright to tip it back into the pan the next day, clean and re-sterilise the jars, and boil the jelly for a while longer. But assuming it’s mostly set, why would you bother unless you were planning an attempt on the local flower and produce show with it?
  • That’s it! Label, store, and enjoy at your leisure. They should keep at least a year in a cool dark place, but best to refrigerate after opening.

Doesn’t seem so hard, does it?  Now, don’t you want to know what happened to those medlars..?