Cooking experiments
8 August 2020 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeHaving picked another pound or so of blackberries, I attempted to make blackberry cordial to eke out my rather limited supplies of squash. The result is a beautiful deep purple colour, but tastes chiefly of aniseed and sugar -- if I dilute it enough not to leave a syrupy aftertaste, all I get is the star anise.
Even less successful was the attempt to use the leftover fruit pulp to make pastilles, as suggested in the recipe. (Making 'fruit leather' from the remnants in the jelly bag after making blackberry and apple jelly had been very disappointing, as I recall, so I didn't even try that.) Having belatedly read the comments on the article, I have to agree with "Has anyone actually made this successfully?"
My first attempt failed to set, so I boiled up the sticky mass again the next day and sacrificed a sachet of jam pectin to get it to gel. I did think I'd finally produced a usable product, but when I tried rolling the little squares in icing sugar they rapidly became covered in oozing liquid. I hastily tried granulated instead, and thought I'd cracked it... but the next morning, after being left out overnight in the hopes that the pastilles might dry out a bit in the heat, the tin was full of sugary liquid as they simply deliquesced. It wasn't even a case of relaxing back into jam -- it was syrup!
I poured off the purple goo and used it to stew gooseberries in, and was forced to put the remaining 'pastilles' in the fridge, where they occupy a lot of space while continuing to deliquesce, but at a slower rate. The flavour isn't bad -- the star anise got caught in the Mouli while I was processing the pulp and ground down to a core before I located and removed it, and I was afraid that the aniseed would totally dominate as a result, but it's actually less obtrusive than in the original cordial -- and the texture isn't bad, but pastilles that ooze are simply not a good way of preserving fruit.
The weather has been so hot that I triedwatervole's old suggestion of making yoghurt in the actual plastic pot I was going to store it in and simply leaving it out all day standing on a hot-water-bottle and wrapped in towels (last night it was eighty degrees and I could probably have done it overnight without the bottle!). It produced set, separated yoghurt --which, oddly enough, had drawn up around the edges of the pot in a convex meniscus, leaving a whey-filled dent in the middle-- but at least I had no need of decanting it.
Not sure I can go on using my strictly limited supply of milk to make yoghurt, though; one packet is supposed to make 3000ml of milk, which is about 15 pints, but I seem to be well down in this packet already and I only opened it last week. (If I make up 1/4 pint of milk into white sauce or custard four times in a week, is that really using any less than if I make a pint of yoghurt and make that last a week? The drawback is that one has to keep making yoghurt on a constant cycle; having it or not having it one week is not optional.)
I made a gazpacho according to my 1960s recipe, which tells you to cut everything into quarter-inch cubes and describes the result as being a salad erroneously categorised as cold soup; it certainly was :-(
Modern recipes on the Internet show gazpacho as a sort of emulsion whisked together in a blender, which might or might not be more palatable; mine was like eating a large bowl of very garlic-flavoured salad as a main course rather than an accompaniment. The next day I tried adding more olive oil and grating some beetroot into it, and thought that an extra 24 hours' chilling had at least damped down the garlic; but while an individual spoonful seemed tamed, chomping through a whole bowl full of the stuff was quite a trial, even with home-made bread.
On the other hand a 'microwave sponge' was entirely successful. You simply take one egg's weight of butter and sugar and flour, the egg, two tablespoons of milk and a teaspoon of baking powder, make a basic sponge mixture, and put it into a bowl on top of your desired fruit/jam topping. I used frozen raspberries and microwaved it for 3-4 minutes, and the result was just as if it had been a steamed pudding.
Even less successful was the attempt to use the leftover fruit pulp to make pastilles, as suggested in the recipe. (Making 'fruit leather' from the remnants in the jelly bag after making blackberry and apple jelly had been very disappointing, as I recall, so I didn't even try that.) Having belatedly read the comments on the article, I have to agree with "Has anyone actually made this successfully?"
My first attempt failed to set, so I boiled up the sticky mass again the next day and sacrificed a sachet of jam pectin to get it to gel. I did think I'd finally produced a usable product, but when I tried rolling the little squares in icing sugar they rapidly became covered in oozing liquid. I hastily tried granulated instead, and thought I'd cracked it... but the next morning, after being left out overnight in the hopes that the pastilles might dry out a bit in the heat, the tin was full of sugary liquid as they simply deliquesced. It wasn't even a case of relaxing back into jam -- it was syrup!
I poured off the purple goo and used it to stew gooseberries in, and was forced to put the remaining 'pastilles' in the fridge, where they occupy a lot of space while continuing to deliquesce, but at a slower rate. The flavour isn't bad -- the star anise got caught in the Mouli while I was processing the pulp and ground down to a core before I located and removed it, and I was afraid that the aniseed would totally dominate as a result, but it's actually less obtrusive than in the original cordial -- and the texture isn't bad, but pastilles that ooze are simply not a good way of preserving fruit.
The weather has been so hot that I tried
watervole's old suggestion of making yoghurt in the actual plastic pot I was going to store it in and simply leaving it out all day standing on a hot-water-bottle and wrapped in towels (last night it was eighty degrees and I could probably have done it overnight without the bottle!). It produced set, separated yoghurt --which, oddly enough, had drawn up around the edges of the pot in a convex meniscus, leaving a whey-filled dent in the middle-- but at least I had no need of decanting it.Not sure I can go on using my strictly limited supply of milk to make yoghurt, though; one packet is supposed to make 3000ml of milk, which is about 15 pints, but I seem to be well down in this packet already and I only opened it last week. (If I make up 1/4 pint of milk into white sauce or custard four times in a week, is that really using any less than if I make a pint of yoghurt and make that last a week? The drawback is that one has to keep making yoghurt on a constant cycle; having it or not having it one week is not optional.)
I made a gazpacho according to my 1960s recipe, which tells you to cut everything into quarter-inch cubes and describes the result as being a salad erroneously categorised as cold soup; it certainly was :-(
Modern recipes on the Internet show gazpacho as a sort of emulsion whisked together in a blender, which might or might not be more palatable; mine was like eating a large bowl of very garlic-flavoured salad as a main course rather than an accompaniment. The next day I tried adding more olive oil and grating some beetroot into it, and thought that an extra 24 hours' chilling had at least damped down the garlic; but while an individual spoonful seemed tamed, chomping through a whole bowl full of the stuff was quite a trial, even with home-made bread.
On the other hand a 'microwave sponge' was entirely successful. You simply take one egg's weight of butter and sugar and flour, the egg, two tablespoons of milk and a teaspoon of baking powder, make a basic sponge mixture, and put it into a bowl on top of your desired fruit/jam topping. I used frozen raspberries and microwaved it for 3-4 minutes, and the result was just as if it had been a steamed pudding.