Marmalade and Mozzarella

We've just finished our first week of WWOOFing with Alastair and Suzie at Earthstead. While it's been a little challenge for bodies used to sitting at desks all day we've both enjoyed settling into the mostly self sufficient lifestyle with plenty of time spent in the kitchen too.

Making use of the seasons produce is high on the agenda and particularly using up some of the milk that their three dairy cows are producing each day. In just the few days we've been here butter, mozzarella, quark, ricotta and halloumi have all been made with Joe getting a chance to tick a few items off his "preserving methods I'd like to try one day" list. He's found a kindred spirit in Al, and the two have been spotted a few times peering at cheese making books trying to decide what to make next, as well as lengthy discussions on whether it's possible to build some sort of cellar for curing hard cheeses in!

Curds and Whey for making mozzarella

When not playing with the fresh milk, there's been fruit and veg for preserving and we've made three batches of marmalade as well as a jar of kimchi. We found the experience of picking our citrus fruit for the marmalade a very surreal one - just not something you'd do in the UK. Here we had a choice of oranges, mandarins, grapefruit, lemons and limes all on the bushes. Madness.

Fresh fruit from the garden

Not all of our time has been spent in the kitchen and Alastair and Suzie run a luxury accommodation business on site with three self contained apartments. Naturally this means there is always plenty of cleaning to be done as one guest leaves and another arrives and we've also been helping with an overhaul of the parking area, clearing it of weeds ready for a fresh layer of gravel. While hard work it's been satisfying to see the area gradually looking so neat and tidy. 

Finally the chairs for the properties are all being freshened up with new upholstery. This isn't something we've done before but with plenty of experience playing with both wood and fabric it isn't something we've found too hard either. As a task it's progressing slowly as we've been distracted by all the other jobs to be done but we've finished our first chair and I have to say it's looking pretty good. Hopefully be able to crack on with the rest next week.

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Elderflower Champagne the Second

Our elderflower champagne has been quietly brewing for the last six weeks and has turned out very tasty - if a little syrupy. It did an excellent job in helping us to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary last weekend with most of those fine people who were willing to be bridesmaids and ushers for us at the time.

We also had five dessert courses - because that's what every fifth anniversary needs, don't you think? Unfortunately we were bad bloggers and took hardly any photos so you'll have to imagine the de-constructed trifle, tripolino, lemon sorbet, chocolate mousse and fresh berry pavlova. Sorry!

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Elderflower Champagne

On such a beautiful sunny weekend it seemed a shame not to get out into the hills around us. It was too warm to go hiking far though so instead we decided to go for more of a stroll and do some foraging. We returned home with a bag of elderflower heads ready for turning into elderflower champagne.

A lot of the best heads were out of reach for me - so I left Joe to it and took charge of the camera instead!

To make Elderflower Champagne you will need:

1 UK Gallon of Water

1.5 lbs Sugar

2 Tbsp's White Wine Vinegar

2 Lemons (sliced)

6 Elderflower heads

Start by boiling the water, sugar and vinegar to dissolve the sugar and to sterilise it all. Leave this to cool until blood temperature.

Just the task for our large grocers scales

While waiting for the liquid to cool remove the elderflowers from the stalks. Some stalk is okay as you will strain this later - but get rid of most of it.

Once the liquid has cooled add the lemons and the elderflowers and leave to steep for 3 days.

Once the three days is up strain the liquid and decant into bottles or a brewing barrel and leave to ferment for 6 weeks. Leave some space at the top for the gasses to expand.

And that's all there is to it. Joe decanted ours into a barrel last night, and we'll have to hope it works because Joe never does things by halves. 

Yes, that's nearly five gallons of elderflower champagne!

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Making a Sticky Mess

This week has been preserves week in our house. We've made jelly, marmalade and chutney resulting in a lot of pan shuffling, using of every utensil and and a lot of stickiness. It's been great!

It all started with the tomatoes. We've been watching our tomatoes fail to ripen for weeks and had come to the conclusion that rather than sit patiently and wait for it to happen we'd make green tomato chutney. Then the week before our free weekend half of the tomatoes ripened. Typical. We decided to make a mixed tomato chutney anyway as we aren't eating enough salads now to get through them.

Then we thought, while we're making chutney, why not make marmalade from the oranges we put in the freezer when the seville oranges were in season. It was looking a good plan - marmalade and chutney would be plenty to keep us our of mischief.

I am from the pre-boil the oranges school of marmalade making. Once boiled the insides just scoop out and the skins are nice and soft for shredding. It is also more pleasurable to be up to your elbows in warm sticky gunge rather than cold sticky gunge!

As the weekend approached though, a box of quinces appeared from stage left. My cousin had been given them and thought we might like some. That sealed the weekends fate of being preserves, preserves, preserves. We no longer had enough empty jars to contain all the goodness but found a willing friend with a stash. While making this lot has certainly kept us busy, much in these recipes is of the "do this, then leave for an hour (or two or twelve)" ilk which makes it quite relaxing work for the amount of output. Perfect!

I love our old grocers scales for this sort of thing. We got them in an antiques shop for less than the normal kitchen sets and it is dead handy for dealing with big quantities! 4lb of fruit? Room to spare!

Recipe states to wipe with a dry cloth. It transpires that the furriness comes off! 

All of our recipes for these came from the same book. This was a charity shop find a few years back, and a must buy for its extensive selection of preserving techniques. It covers everything from jams to wines, drying and smoking to chutneys and pickles. It also has a lovely, very extensive, section on home freezing, clearly written for a generation where a freezer was a gadget not an essential.

ISBN 0330255630

The results (in iphone panorama form)!

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Smoked Garlic

Part of our garlic crop had a bad year and was wilted and brown a month early. These garlic were all on the small side so I decided it was best to do something with them and process them as a batch. Having just completed a lot of work on the table I had a big bag of oak sawdust so decided to go and attempt some smoking. I have long admired the art of cold smoking so decided that a gentle smoke of the garlic before preserving may be fun. Being a sunny day helped!

I cobbled together a smoker from things we had around the house already. A storm kettle made the fire box and chimney to distance the food from the heat. For the smoking chamber I hijacked a terracotta pot, lining up the hole in its base with the chimney and covering the top with a convenient lump of firewood.

One ad-hoc smoker.

To support the garlic in the pot I simply used some wire mesh. I peeled the bulbs down to cloves so that the smoke could have the minimum layers of papery skin to get through.

The garlic balanced on some chicken wire to let the smoke get at it. This pot is only small - some of those cloves are tiny!

To generate the smoke I used a couple of lumps of lit charcoal buried in a mix of damp and dry oak shavings. Occasionally I added some sprigs of rosemary for extra aromatic scents. This fire needed to tick over very slowly and did require tending every 30 minutes or so.

Charcoal, sawdust and rosemary. Pungent.

I left the whole lot to smoke away slowly for around 5-6 hours. This wasn't a very long smoke as I didn't want to commit days to building up the cold smoke - manually checking the fire every half hour would have been very time consuming!

Smoke wafts out from under the lid.

Once done the garlic cloves smelt wonderful and were turning a golden colour. I peeled the cloves and minced them, preserving them in the freezer. Generally the gloves were still firm, indicating that I didn't get it too hot. With garlic (or so my reading informs me) if you hot smoke it they go to mush and become suitable for using as a dip but won't have the strength for use as proper garlic any more. The end result has certainly seemed tasty in several meals!

The finished product.

To preserve it I stuck the minced garlic in oil and froze it. It is a bit awkward to get out the jar but it's better than botulism!

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