Tag Archives: Pasturising

Food, Preserving, Produce, Recipes

Elderflower cordial

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Well I’m already doing much better at preserving this year than I was last year. A few batches of rhubarb and cinnamon jam and of rhubarb cordial, a batch of lilac cordial (which I’m turning into wine) and I finally bottled my rose petal wine that I think I kicked off in 2018!

This week I’ve switched focus to elderflower. Elder is an amazing tree to get to know for foraging. The flowers are quite distinctive (as is the smell – fragrant but turns a bit cat peey as the blossom ages) and come in nice and early before you have too many things on your plate. The berries will develop if you don’t pick the flower head, and whilst they aren’t one to eat straight off the tree, they make a great wine, jam, gin flavouring or syrup. It’s always best to leave some flowers up top for the birds (saves you reaching) and some down low for you to collect the berries from later in the year.

The three stages of elderflowers. Pre -bloom (middle), full bloom (top), post-bloom (bottom)

In the past we used to make a lot of elderflower wine and even did elderflower champagne for a friend’s wedding and then our own wedding. Sam’s not as keen on the elderflower taste now and we’ve moved away from buying in things to preserve, using what the land gives us instead and we only have 1 good Elder here.

Me with a whole lot of elderflower champagne

So this year I thought I’d try my hand at an elderflower cordial. Things I can actually drink whilst I’m not drinking alcohol, and that I can get the kids involved in are hits at the moment. I’m terrible at following recipes. Give me a protocol in the lab and I’ll follow it to the letter, give me a recipe and my brain gets bored halfway through the ingredients list. So I’m not sure what recipe I followed, when I looked back to see what to do after steeping I can’t find a recipe that matches what I’d done so far. It came out well though so I’ll tell you what I did.

Elderflower cordial

~30 heads of elderflower in good bloom, snipped into smaller ‘heads’
4 lemons – rind and juice
2kg of sugar
1l of water

I snipped the heads of elderflower down to remove most of the stem and placed them in a pot with the rind and juice of the lemons (seeds included as I squeezed them by hand).

Next I boiled up the water and added the sugar. Off the heat I stirred it until the sugar dissolved and left it for 10 mins to cool off a bit.

Pour the syrup over the elderflower and lemon mix. Leave to steep for at least 24 hours. Mine got left for 2 days.

Scoop off the elderflowers and strain the cordial. At this stage I used a fine sieve but I think next time I’d just a straining bag as there were a few black bits that came through that might be off putting to some.

Pour into sterilised bottles and pasteurise. If you aren’t comfortable pasteurising you could heat the cordial and then bottle hot. Allow to cool and store in a cupboard, refrigerate once opened.

  • Freshly picked flowers
  • Chi cutting the stems down
  • Short stems with lemon
  • The final product


Ours came out very strong, you don’t have to add much at all to get a good flavour. We got 3x 750ml bottles, I think I will get some smaller bottles for cordial though as the 750ml ones last a long time. Next up is hopefully rhubarb gin, elderflower vodka and rhubarb and ginger jam.

Dans



Children, Food, Growing, Preserving, Produce, Weather

Harvest 2018

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You may have noticed that we’ve been rather quiet over the last few months. As my due date got closer I really went into nesting and birth preparation mode. It was quite odd seeing the different fruits come into season and not harvesting them. August should have been filled with harvesting and preserving but instead instead it saw me growing in size, decreasing in mobility, organising and reading. I have to admit to feeling a bit jealous of everyone else’s harvest posts, and even my own from previous years.

We did manage to harvest a little from the land, the beauty of bath apples were first, the wasps got to a fair few but we still got a few bottles of juice from them. We harvested, quartered, froze and then juiced when we had time (and my nephew’s help). It worked well.

Pressing apples after defrosting. You certainly get more juice.

The tomatoes were next, not as good a harvest as last year by far, we lost a lot, especially the cherry tomatoes, but we did get a few jars of passata. I also finally processed the last of last year’s toms so my passata stores are looking healthy again.

We had our first experience of blossom end rot with the toms. This was our first year with raised beds but also our first heat wave year. I am hoping that if we add some more nutrients to the soil and keep steady with our watering next year, then we won’t see it again.

One thing that benefited from the heat wave was our attempt at melons. We got a few good size, really tasty cantaloupe melons. I’m really keen to try these again and see what we get when we put some effort in to them. We got a couple aubergines and sweet peppers too.

One of our tasty melons

We lost a lot of the cooking apples and pears as well. The apples were a smaller harvest anyway as one tree barely fruited but the pear trees were laden. We did manage to have our first attempt at pear juice and have enough harvested Williams pears to do some dried pear.

It was a good year for pears

We always knew this year wouldn’t be great in terms of the smallholding, my body doesn’t do pregnancy well and we ended up with an emergency C-section which put me out of action for far longer than I had hoped. We had a go at planting, harvesting and preserving but kept our expectations low.

On the upside we now have our not so little boy. I have just about recovered from the section enough to get back to work on the smallholding. It’s been a little forced as Sam broke his foot last week. It does feel good to be back to doing lots (when baby allows of course) and I’m feeling very motivated to get this place back on track.

Baby’s first trip to the polytunnel.

Dans

As always likes and comments are much appreciated. We have a new Instagram account for all the day to day posts, we are @six_oaks_smallholding

Brewing, Food, Preserving, Produce, Recipes

Adventures with rhubarb

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So this year we haven’t been doing as much with growing but there are two very prolific rhubarb bushes just by our bedroom window. I’ve never been very good at using rhubarb. I tried for several years to do rhubarb wine and it has bested me every time. For some reason I always get a smell and taste of old socks from it. One day I will try again and I will master a rhubarb wine. My only other experiment with rhubarb is the Finnish fruit soup which comes out ok but does need cream or milk with it. I planned to change that this year.

I started with the Finnish fruit cake I do but doing first an apple and rhubarb and then a rhubarb on it’s own. They were both lovely but the I really like the solo rhubarb one. Unfortunately I haven’t mastered a gluten free cake yet, the only gluten free flour our Tescos does is Doves farm and it just comes out too thick, even with extra baking powder. I tried the Tesco cake mix but due to not checking the ingredients it just came out as a molten sugar mess, my biggest baking disaster yet, it actually got scraped into the bin. I’ve bought some flour from Morrisons though and I’ll give the Tesco cake mix another try but without adding sugar. Fingers crossed I can make a decent tasting cake that my body approves of. Home made cake with home made custard is just so lovely.

The next step was some jam. I made jam late last year for the first time and really enjoyed it, but for some reason I have had cold feet about doing jam this year. Which is kind of crazy as I am hoping to be making jams and chutneys for sale next year as an added income from our fruit trees. I finally bit the bullet when Chi was settling in for her first long day at a new nursery. She seemed to be settling well but I wanted to be close to the phone and not too tied into a job. The rhubarb was also getting a bit overgrown at this point too. I’m very glad I gave it a go as it really is simple and Chi had us down to our last jar of jam (blackberry), she really does like jam on her toast and porridge. The rhubarb and vanilla worked well but I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t as sharp as I was hoping, in fact it was really a bit too sweet. I’ll try again with less sugar and see if I can get one to our taste. That said Chi loved it on her porridge and Sam enjoyed it on his toast.

The recipe was taken from the BBC and is simply equal amounts of sugar and fruit (1kg) with 2 cinnamon sticks stirred until the sugar dissolves, then the juice of 1 lemon added and proceed as you would for any jam. You do have to scrape the scum off the top though, we used a metal spoon for this and once cool Sam gobbled up the scum! Waste not want not here.

Lastly I’ve had my first go at a cordial. I found this a bit daunting too, but that seems to be a trend for me with new skills. It was really simple once I carved out the time for it, another day of Chi at nursery where other commitments meant I couldn’t get stuck into a big job outside. I used  another BBC recipe for this one, using an orange and a lemon as well as rhubarb. I was meant to use ginger too, and even had it in the house, but completely forgot to add it. Maybe for the best as it would be nice for Chi to have this and I’m not sure how the ginger will affect her liking of it.

I have to say that I’m not sure I did it quite right. I did it in the jam pan as that is easy to pour from and I don’t know if the thicker bottom will have affected things. I also think I left it too long. The recipe said ‘until the rhubarb is falling apart’ but I wasn’t sure if that was just some of the rhubarb or all of it so I waited until it was all coming apart. The cordial was very thick. The recipe expected 600ml to be produced but I only got about 250ml until I pressed and squeezed the bag with a metal spoon. I ended up with about 400ml which seems like very little. The rhubarb I used was quite old though, very thick stems, and the weather has been quite dry, so it is possible the fruit itself had less moisture to give. It is lovely and tasty though, maybe a bit more orangey in flavour than I was expecting,. the ginger may balance that out.

I had heard that cordial needs to be stored in the fridge so I called Vigo Presses to see if I can pasteurise it for a longer cupboard storage. We bought our pasteuriser and apple pressing kit from them a couple of years ago and I am still really happy with their customer service. They said I can absolutely pasteurise it but also suggested using a steamer to produce a cordial that will store in the cupboard without pasteurisation.

As I only got 400ml this time I haven’t bothered to pasteurise but we do have a Mehu Liisa in the cupboard that I think I will use to make the next batch of cordial. It came straight from Finland so doesn’t have English instructions but I think I will ask my mother in law or some of our Finnish family for help with it. It looks like it will take a lot longer than just on the hob but it can be left and I like the idea of not having to pasteurise separately. I might also get a better return. I think I’ll do another post about that when I get around to giving it a try.

The only picture I have of the Mehu Liisa in action (blackberries)

Dans

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Food, Preserving, Produce

Pressing frozen apples

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We’re having a bit of a freezer crisis at the moment. We’ve got quite a lot of home grown fruit, veg and meat in the freezers now, as well as some bought in pork from other smallholders. This means that we are nearing capacity, which of course is brilliant, if I can get sorted with using what is inside then it will really lower our food costs and is in tune with the whole reason for this smallholding, eating home grown produce. We did really well at getting on with the preserving last year, apple sauce, apple and cucumber chutney, lots of jams, passatas, apple juice and wine etc but the freezers are still quite full.

I’m pregnant and due in August, that means that during our peak harvest of fruit and veg and when we shall be getting hogget and possibly mutton back from the butchers I be either heavily pregnant or dealing with a newborn. I’m not sure how productive I will be in the kitchen, but given the state of my hips currently I think it’s a good idea to bet on me not doing much at all. So what will we do with all the produce? Wash, chop and shove in the freezer of course! Then, when baby is older I can start working through it. The issue is there is no space for a summer’s worth of produce at the moment, so I need to get clearing while I still can.

That brings me to this post, and hopefully a few more along the same lines in the coming months. Emptying the freezers and turning the contents into tasty and in some cases, long lasting, foods. We kicked off this process this week with the immanent arrival of 3 geese and 2 chickens for the chest freezer. At the end of last year we were drowning in apples and, after contacting Vigo Presses, I washed, chopped and frozen 2 builders buckets of cooking apples. Just straight in the freezer with some cling film over the top. These came out along with a small bag of Beauty of Bath apples. We popped them in an empty fridge to defrost for a couple days and dusted off the apple press.

Vigo had suggested that if doing the apples from frozen we may benefit from a mesh bag to put the crushed pieces into inside the press. I can’t remember what stopped me from buying it at the time but I am guessing eventually the tab got closed on my computer and it got forgotten about. I’m not sure we actually needed to crush the apples, they pretty much turned to a mush despite still being a little frozen.

We then got to the pressing stage and soon realised the reasoning behind needing the mesh bag. A fair amount of the apple just squeezed through the press and we even got some spurting. It was certainly going to be a cloudy apple juice. As we couldn’t press it too much the mush ended up being quite wet at the end, much wetter than we would have liked so a lot of juice remained in it. If we had the bag we could have probably gotten it a lot drier and gotten more juice.

We took the juice inside and poured it through a small colander into a pot, we had about 10 pints of juice. We left it to sit for a while as I was feeling a bit broken by the point but I’m glad we did. When I went back to it there was quite a bit of frothy scum that had risen to the top. We had this with our first batch of juice and Vigo had said then that letting it stand may reduce that. I scooped off the scum and bottled the juice.

It went into the pasteuriser which had been filled with cold water and set to 75°C for 25 mins. We sat down to watch TV and forgot about it so it had long been done by the time I remembered. The bottles were still too hot to touch though. Being so hot for so long may have affected the flavour but hopefully not, we haven’t opened a bottle yet although we did taste some freshly pressed juice which was lovely. I used our nifty grabby tool to get the bottles out, tightened the caps and lay them on their sides. There is still quite a lot of scum so I think we will leave the juice to stand for longer next time. The juice is also quite dark after pasteurising but this time I didn’t bother with ascorbic acid or citric acid, the juice tastes fine as is and I just didn’t feel like adding extra things in just for aesthetics.

Just to pop labels on them and drink them in the next 1-2 years. A learning experience to be sure, but we now know we can juice from frozen apples and have some ideas on how to improve the process. As a bonus it made just enough space for the geese and chickens which went into the freezer the next afternoon.

Dans

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Preserving

Apple pressing

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Sam and I decided to forgo the usual exchange of christmas presents and put the money we would spend towards something useful. In the black friday sales we went all out on some juicing equipment from Vigo Press. We bought a Classic Crusher A, a 20 litre press and a stainless steel pasturiser. Just before Christmas we decided to try it out. We gathered the last of the apples from the trees, eating and cooking and gave it a go.

We had about 20kg of apples and set up a little production line. We gave the apples a quick rinse in a tub of water, quartered them (cutting away and bruised or bad bits) and put them in the crusher.

The production line (and little helper loading the crusher)

We ran them through that once, in batches of 10kg, the crusher was really easy to use, so easy a child could do it. Chi had a great time putting the apples in and even turning the crusher.

We then used the press, that was a bit more complicated. We didn’t secure the press and I think that next time we will bolt it to a pallet or something. We ended up having to have one person hold it whilst the other wound it to press the fruit. I didn’t get any pictures of this step though, I will do next time.

We had a stainless steel pot underneath to collect the juice. Chi was very happy to have a taste of the juice fresh from the press! We added some citric acid in the hope that it would stop browning. It didn’t, after talking to the staff at Vigo Press they suggested using ascorbic acid at 0.5g/litre, I think we will try that next time.

The first taste

We didn’t end up with as much juice as I had hoped for, about 8 750ml bottles. Again Vigo Press advised that we could try running the apples through the crusher twice and we shall definately be trying that next time. The pressed apples weren’t as dry as I had been expecting them to be so I think we could have gotten more liquid from them. They did make a nice treat for the geese and chickens though.

We pasturised the juice and I was very happy to see that it did lighten in colour, so it wasn’t so brown. The only issue we had was that some scum appeared at the neck of the bottle. We might get less of this if we use a mesh bag in the press to stop bits and pieces coming through. But Vigo Press suggested leaving in a sealed container overnight and then pasturising, so that’s another option.

In the pasturiser

The juice tasted really nice, and although we only got 8 bottles we are managing to save them for special occassions. I am really looking forward to 2017, we will keep more apples this year as I had been getting rid of any with even small blemishes. I can see some nice family days pressing apples, it’s a great family activity. And I’m looking forward to trying it with pears and with trying to make some wine with the juices. Yep, very excited to get more use out of this equipment!

Finished product (and wonky label)

Dans

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