POACHED QUINCE ON MY PORRIDGE
Tuesday November 16th 2010, 10:36 pm

A basket full of quinces

Month eleven, already the penultimate month of Tigress’s can jam canning challenge and for November the ingredient chosen by the talented artisan preserver Confituras aka blogger Cosmic Cowgirl is apples, pears and quince, a versatile selection of orchard fruits with delicious potential.
I could find a gazillion uses for each of these, but have chosen luscious quinces for this canjam contribution. A few days ago I used up the last quince of the year. I always vow to bottle plenty and never seem to achieve my ambition. Once this fruit grabs you, you are totally smitten. Considering how fab they are it surprises me that quince aren’t more popular; they are still seen as an unusual fruit. You have to seek them out and may find a supply at a farmers market, otherwise you need your own quince tree or to know someone else who has one. They take at least 5 years to produce fruit by the way if you are thinking of planting one.
They are one of the few fruits that I love so much, I’d pay real money just for a whiff of, never mind a taste of, each year, though this time was lucky enough to find a supply for free when someone kindly advertised quinces up for grabs on the local Freecycle. I moved at the speed of light to get round to that house, believe me. These Freecyclers had 2 trees heaving with fruit, that were so laden they had had to be propped up with stakes and ropes. It gave me the opportunity to see quinces growing on the tree for the first time and to notice what untidy trees they are to produce such exceptional fruits.
Of course, one of quinces magical qualities, apart from the wonderous unmistakable scent, is the way a hard unpalatable fruit turns delicious at the same time turning such a wonderful shade of deep ruby red as it cooks. I’m generally of the mind that long cooking times are of no benefit to ingredients, but quince turns this notion on its head. You need to slow cook ’em and slow cook ’em till they change colour, which can take 3 – 6 hours.

Quince fruits

As regards the pantry, I want a supply of quince in spiced vanilla syrup, as straightforward as that. This is when canning makes such perfect sense and in theory allows you to preserve such a fabulous ingredient to last you all year round till the next time, though I haven’t managed that thus far. Preserving enough quince in jars is my ambition. A favourite way to serve them, on oatmeal porridge with Greek yogurt for breakfast. As simple as that. To prepare, they are quite hard work to peel and cut, so don’t expect elegant slices.

POACHED QUINCE IN VANILLA SYRUP

To fill 2 x 500ml (1 pint) jars

6 – 8 quinces
1 lemon
600ml (2 1/2 cups) water
250g (1 cup) sugar
1 cinnamon stick
1 vanilla pod
a few cloves

Scrub the quinces to remove the fuzzy coating. Peel, quarter and core the fruit. Cut each quince quarter into 2 or 3 slices, depending on the size of the fruit and immediately drop them into a bowl of acidulated water (water with some lemon juice added, as they discolour very quickly if you don’t).

You can put peel and cores in a pan, cover with water and simmer for 4 hours, topping up with more water if necessary, then pour into a jelly bag, collecting the juice that drips through overnight. You can use this juice to top up the syrup if you find you need more to fill your jars and use what is left to make quince jelly. I also put the pulp left in the jelly bag through a food mill to make a quince puree, so nothing goes to waste.

Preheat the oven to 110 C (225 F, Mk 1/4). Make a sugar syrup by heating the water and sugar together, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Drain and place the quince slices in a large ovenproof casserole, adding the cinnamon stick, cloves, a few pieces of lemon peel and the vanilla pod, after splitting it lengthways and scraping and the seeds out from the middle. Pour the syrup over the fruit and spices. Put the casserole on the hob and bring to the boil then remove from heat. Place a lid on the casserole and cook in the oven for 5 – 6 hours.

Another way to cook the quinces is to use a slow cooker. Place the quince, spices and hot sugar syrup in the slow cooker casserole and cook on high for the first hour, then turn down to low and cook for 6 – 8 hours, by which time the fruit will have turned a deep red wine colour.

Prepare the water bath, jars and seals ready for canning. For more info about how to hot water process, refer to the guide here.
Fill hot jars with quince slices, distributing the spices and vanilla pod amongst the jars and top up with syrup, leaving the required headspace for your type of jars. De-bubble, to remove air pockets, wipe the jar rims clean then seal and process for 15 minutes. Remove from the water bath and leave till completely cold before testing the seals and labelling.

A bowl of oatmeal porridge with poached quince

OATMEAL PORRIDGE

For 2 people
100g (1/2 cup) organic medium oatmeal
650ml (3 1/4 cups) water
a pinch of salt

Toast the oatmeal in a pan for a few minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon until you begin to smell the toasted oat aroma. Add the water and salt and bring to a simmer, then cook for 20-30 minutes until thickened as you like it and cooked through, adding more water if necessary. That’s all there is too it!



CRAB APPLES, SLOES AND JELLY APPLES
Tuesday October 26th 2010, 5:00 pm

Wills cigarette card from 1924 of crab apple

There’s still a way to go, but gradually I am conquering the mountain of fruits that inhabits my kitchen. Apples and grapes are still turning up by, what seems like, the shed load but the foraged fruits are becoming less plentiful and day by day more jars are filled and shelf space becomes more scarce. The pantry is now looking well stocked up for the winter and it makes the arduous jobs carried out along the way, fade to a distant memory. Like when I pitted cherries until three in the morning or spent over three hours shelling enough cob nuts to fill the tweeniest jar. Bramble scarred and nettle stung hands are at last healing after all the hedgerow foraging for rosehips and sloes. Why do they always grow surrounded by a duvet of nettles as well as having their own built in barbed protection for extra measure? There is still lots to do but at the same time it feels as if the big preserving season is starting to wind down.
Everything made more recently has become more than one thing; canning apple juice produced a jelly bag full of apple pulp that in turn became apple butter; grapes juiced to make chilli jam likewise transformed into grape butter. Apple and damsons cooked and pureed earlier for cheese stretched to make an additional 3 pots of curd and the remainder, two sheets of fruit leather. The other day I had a fundamental thought – Note to self, remember to eat all this stuff!

Wills cigarette card from 1924 of sloes

Sloe gin is maturing nicely and will be ready to drink by Christmas. Still with a colander full of sloes and a good amount of wild crab apples to use up it seems the ideal opportunity to rustle up a jelly and with a plentiful supply of vanilla pods, left over stock from my recently closed emporium, I decided to add them into the mix at the same time. I reckoned that to be an adequate combination of ingredients for my jelly until a handful of japonica fruits, eight small rock hard unyielding specimens, caught my eye, so they might as well join the party as well.
Japonica are the fruit of the ornamental garden shrub Chaenomeles Japonica and are similar to a quince. They are best used for making jelly and are sometimes referred to as jelly apples. I underestimated just what an impact these few fruits would have on this jelly. As soon as they started to cook in with the other ingredients, my house was filled with that fabulous perfumed quince scent. I added them as an afterthought but even with so few fruits they brought a lovely character along, in a ‘less is more’ way. I’m sure this jelly will taste fab without japonica as well, please feel encouraged to make things up as you go along with the ingredients you have to hand. All three main ingredients are high in pectin, the stuff that helps jam to set, so are perfect for a jelly. The end result has a beautiful colour flecked through with vanilla seeds and tastes heavenly. The quantities stated below are the amounts I had at my disposal and are given as a guide. My recommendation is to use approximately twice as many crab apples as sloes and calculate the amount of sugar based on the amount of juice this produces.

ornamental japonica

CRAB APPLE, SLOE AND JAPONICA JELLY WITH VANILLA

Makes approx 2.2Kg (5 lbs)

775g (1 3/4lbs) sloes, rinsed and drained
1275g (2 3/4lbs) crab apples, rinsed, drained and roughly chopped
a handful of japonica, approx 8 fruits (optional), rinsed drained and cut into quarters
sugar
1 vanilla pod

Place the fruits in a large pan. Add enough water to barely cover and heat to a simmer. Cook for approximately 30 minutes, until the fruit is cooked through, mashing the fruit with the back of a wooden spoon and giving it a stir now and again. Remove from the heat and pour into a jelly bag suspended over a bowl to collect the juice. Leave overnight to drip through.
Next day measure the juice and pour it into a jam pan. (Rather than waste the fruit pulp from the jelly bag, you can push it through a sieve or food mill to make a puree then use to make a fruit butter.) For every 600ml (2 1/2cups) juice, add 450g (1lb) sugar. Split the vanilla pod lengthways and scrape out the sticky seeds inside with the sharp point of a knife. Add the pod and the seeds to the pan.
Place clean jam jars and lids in the oven to sterilise for 20 minutes at 100C (225F) or alternatively prepare a water bath and jars if you intend to can your jelly. Stir over a low heat to dissolve the sugar, then turn up the heat and bring to a rolling boil, maintaining until setting point is reached (this took me 20 minutes). To test for this, a blob of syrup on a cold plate will form a skin that wrinkles as you draw your finger across the surface. Remove the vanilla pod then pour into hot jars and seal. Alternatively hot water process for 10 minutes. Refer to previous posts and link for more canning information if you are new to this. Leave till completely cold and set then remember to label.

crab apple, sloe and japonica jelly

The crab apple and sloe images are from a set of 50 cards of flowering trees and shrubs produced and given away with Will’s cigarettes in 1924.
Finally, a book recommendation: a recent find and now a favourite, Fruits of the Hedgerow and Unusual Garden Fruits by Charlotte Popescu (published 2005, Cavalier Paperbacks) is a really useful and charming book that I have spent many hours reading through for inspiration and it’s a snip on Amazon.