So for sott’aceto (preserving in vinegar), marinate just one
vegetable or invent a mix that can be stored for months or nibbled straight
away. Try sliced courgette, red pepper and basil, or green beans with sliced
shallots and mint or, my favourite, pickled fennel. Choose vinegar
carefully: sherry with thymed carrots; balsamic with tiny borrettane onions;
or raspberry vinegar with beetroot. Use the best, and banish malt vinegar
for ever.
To make pickled fennel, finely slice your bulbs, blanch for a few minutes in
salty water, drain, dry and pack into a sterilised jar. Simmer enough
vinegar to cover your veg, add a teaspoon each of fennel seeds and
peppercorns and a couple of bay leaves. Check that the contents are
submerged.
Sott’olio (preserving in oil) is a more short-term method to
preserve special offerings such as asparagus with mint, cauliflower with
coriander and chilli, or artichoke hearts and lemon, by first cooking in
vinegar and herbs, then covering in marinade. Such mixes will keep in the
fridge for up to two months.
Harvest eight artichokes, then trim off stalks and all outer leaves till you
reach the heart, spooning out the choke and slicing in half. Dunk in lemon
juice, then blanch in 300ml vinegar and a teaspoon of salt till softish.
Drain, cool, and bring to the boil in a marinade of 450ml of best olive oil
and 75ml of lemon juice with a few peppercorns. Spoon the artichokes into
jars and cover with marinade.
For passata (bottled tomato sauce) turn San Marzano cooking tomatoes into
bottles of ready-made sauce. The seed varieties ‘Astro’, ‘Follia’ and
‘Scatalone’ are available from alpineveg.com .
Try simplifying the process, which normally involves blanching, skinning and
deseeding, by using a magical passata machine (from Seeds of Italy) that
removes skin and pips from any fruit or vegetable. Add a little salt and
basil with an inch layer of olive oil to seal. Put the sealed bottles in a
saucepan of water, ensure they are submerged and simmer for 10 minutes.
Leave the bottles until the water has cooled. The passata will keep until
2013.
How to sterilise jars
• In a preheated oven (150C/300F/Gas 2) place washed and dried
jars for five minutes.
• In the dishwasher on a very hot cycle.
• In sterilising solution, such as Miltons.
Glass Kilner-like storage jars for bottling are best (from lakeland.co.uk
or jamjarshop.co.uk) but I often reuse
favourite jam jars.
SARAH ON APPLES AND RASPBERRIES
We all have our price. Mine is raspberries. Considered by some as a poor
relation to the strawberry — which I find too sweet and gaudy — for me,
their tangy bite is the highlight of the British summer, especially if
freshly coaxed from the cane. I have let my once-serried ranks of raspberry
bushes take over much of the back of our garden and we feast on them fresh
from June to early September, then enjoy them as jam for the rest of the
year.
All that preserving sugar, however, somehow demeans them and the cloying
sweetness masks their fruity delicacy. In addition, miraculous though the
summer glut is, after a while the eighth dish starring the particular fruit
or vegetable being harvested can become dispiriting. So this year I have
found alternative ways of prolonging the lives of our raspberries, and other
home-grown fruit and vegetables, so not a berry, pepper, apple or chilli is
wasted.
Dehydration
My first attempt with the raspberries was with a food dehydrator. A simple
mechanism that slowly extracts all water from fruit, meat and vegetables, it
can prolong the life of most garden produce. I also added a few early
windfall apples. They were not quite ripe, but dehydrating concentrates the
sweetness so it is a great way for saving apples that have fallen from the
tree too soon. The kitchen filled with a heavenly aroma as the fruits
surrendered their juices.
Mixed with a basic muesli base of toasted oats and nuts, the dried raspberries
and apples add sweet, fruity bursts to an otherwise dull breakfast.
Store any dried fruit in airtight jars in a cool, dark place and check every
so often for spoiling; dried this way your produce can last for months. Just
be aware that very juicy fruits, such as strawberries, need to be cut up
into tiny pieces before being put in the dehydrator, otherwise the time it
takes to dry them whole – more than 24 hours – could cost you as much as it
would to jet them in from Spain.
Fridge jam
While turning raspberries into conventional jam in my view spoils them,
“fridge jam” creates a delightfully fruity preserve that still retains the
raspberries’ essential tartness and, if stored cleverly, can last almost as
long as ordinary jam.
Fridge jam is simple and fast to make. Once you have picked your berries,
instead of adding the same amount of sugar as for conventional jam-making,
add only half that amount; so for 4lb of raspberries, add only 2lb of sugar.
Don’t worry about it not setting: add the juice of half a lemon and some
lemon pips tied up in muslin for extra pectin and it works a treat. Once the
berries have cooked gently for about 10 minutes, releasing their juices, add
the sugar and boil until when you scoop a bit out onto a cold teaspoon it
becomes sticky.
Preserve the jam in sterilised jars, the smaller the better, and once opened
keep in the fridge.
Vacuum sealing
Vacuum sealing is a way of extending the shelf life of fresh food by up to
three times, either in the pantry or in the fridge, and means soups and
stews can be rotated much more slowly without having to freeze them, so the
family barely remembers it has had curried pepper, carrot and chicken soup
for the fourth time.
An added advantage is you can cook in larger batches, saving both your, and
your oven’s, energy. My vacuum-sealed curried pepper, carrot and chicken
soup lasted more than 10 days in the fridge and tasted just as good on the
10th day as it did on the first.
The sealer is also rather exciting and I must admit that when it first
arrived, even though the instructions say “This is not a toy”, I started
sealing anything — grapes, pencils, coins — just to watch them shrink into
little rigid packets. Shrink-wrapping berries before freezing them also
helps retain their structure so when defrosted they don’t just become a
soggy mess.
• With thanks to Andrew James (andrewjamesworldwide.com)
for the loan of the food dehydrator (from £43.95) and vacuum sealer
(from £38.95)
Speak Your Mind