Foodle

This is like a little potted bit of summer. The delicate flavour of white nectarines in a jar.

White Nectarine Jam
(makes about 6 to 7 1-cup jars of jam)

About 1.5 kilos nectarines
800 grams sugar
juice of one small lemon (about two ice cubes worth of juice)

Blanch the nectarines by dipping them in boiling water for about 30 seconds, then dipping them into cold water to loosen the skins. Slip the skins off (preferably leaving as much of the pink flesh under the skin as possible for a more lovely pink colour). Cut in half, remove the pit, and then slice into pieces about the size you want in a jam pot (I did nice thin wedges).

Weigh out 1 kilo of the nectarine slices. Eat any left over to make sure the nectarines are are wonderful as they look. Don't just throw the extras in because the ratio of a jam recipe is delicate and messing with it causes jam failures.

Put nectarines, lemon juice, and sugar in a jam pot and heat until the sugar is dissolved. Pour into a glass or ceramic bowl, cool it down, and let it sit overnight in the refrigerator (24 hours is optimal; less is fine).

The next day, prepare your jam jars and water bath.

Sieve the juice from the fruit into the jam pot, and set the fruit aside. Heat the juice to 105C on a candy thermometer, which should be about five minutes of boiling. Add the fruit back in, reheat and boil for a further five minutes, until the fruit starts to turn translucent. If you don't like surprises, check the set of the jam. Remove from heat, skim any foam off the surface with a spoon (you can put the foam in an unsealable jar for later, or on a slice of bread for right away; it's not bad, it's just not pretty).

Ladle the jam into jars until they are full to 1/4" from the top, clean the rims, and seal in the water bath according to your elevation. If you have not quite enough for a full jar, do not process it but set it aside to refrigerate for immediate consumption. My partial jar didn't even make it into the fridge.

Technorati Tags: jam, nectarines, summer

Many years ago my mother sent my father out to get sour cherries, and he came home with sweet cherries. Lots of them. So she took our usual abundance of red raspberries and made a quantity of sweet cherry raspberry jam that has become legendary. It is quite possibly one of the finest red jams known to mankind.

Well, the other day I was walking into Trader Joe's and noticed a 3-lb container of sweet cherries on sale. I added in a few frozen packages of red raspberries (one of the fruits it is totally worth buying organic, by the way, because they absorb everything), and that evening I made up some jam.

Here's the recipe I used (I made two batches with my 3 lbs of cherries):

Sweet Cherry Raspberry Jam (aka Cherry-Berry Jam)

1 3/8 lbs cleaned and pitted sweet cherries
1 1/8 lbs frozen organic red raspberries
(or divide the fruit to get a total of 2 1/2 lbs of fruit in the proportions of your choice)

juice of one small lemon (two ice cubes of frozen lemon juice, in my case)
4 cups sugar
1 packet no/low-sugar pectin

Some recipes have you chop the cherries up, but I like how whole fruits feel in a jam. If you don't, this is the point where you chop up your cherries as you prefer them. The raspberries will fall apart in cooking any way you work it, especially if they have already been frozen, so don't bother spending too much time on them.

Put the fruit, sugar, and lemon juice into glass bowls and allow to macerate overnight. I prefer 24 hours.

The next day, prep your jam jars and water bath. Put the contents of the bowl on the stove and heat until sugar is dissolved in the juice. Mix in the packet of pectin.

Heat to a simmer and hold it there for one minute. Then test your set, skim the top (I skim it into a jar to put in the fridge: it's just foamy, not bad), and ladle the jam into the pots, cover, and process.

Makes 7-8 one-cup jars of jam, depending on how enthusiastic you are about skimming.

Technorati Tags: berries, cherries, jam, raspberries

Today, after a day and a half or so of pressing, with turns every 12 hours, it was time to take the weights off the cheese.

I used a small weight to fit into the mold and help with pressing, and it made an impression. Maybe next time we make cheese I will carve a custom pattern plate for the top.

Now we spend several days regularly flipping the cheese as it air-dries. When it has a decent crust on it, we can wax it and put it away to finish curing.

For Christmas, I gave Noel a cheesemaking kit from Cheesemaking.com. It took us a while to get around to it, but this week we went and bought two gallons of Strauss Family Creamery's non-homogenized whole milk from the Alameda Market, and today we started a batch of cheddar cheese.

You begin by heating the milk up to 90F over gentle heat.

When it warms up, the butterfat melts and rises to the top. With homogenized milk -- the stuff you usually get at the grocery store -- this would not happen.

Then the milk gets a bacterial culture and goes to sit in a nice warm place (we put it in a warm oven) for about an hour. After it's cultured for a while, you add the rennet, which it the stuff that makes it into cheese. Another hour later curds have formed, but now you need to cut them into small chunks so you can squeeze out all the whey and have solid cheese.

So you take a knife and slice it up into tiny pieces.

To get the curds to firm up some more and separate from the whey, you heat the pot very slowly in a water bath. We used the sink and poured in hot water from a kettle. Stir it gently to spread the heat evenly.

Then it's time to filter out the curds in a cheesecloth.

They're quite wet with whey still.

So we hung them in the cheesecloth for an hour or so, letting the whey drip out into a pot. Maybe we can come up with some great use for whey.

At this point it became obvious that almost everything we own eventually becomes a kitchen appliance or tool. For example, the 30-lb free weights.

The curds come down from being hung still very wet.

At this point we broke them up, and added salt as a preservative (and for flavour).

Then they go into a cheesecloth-lined cheese mold to be pressed. We did this in the sink because it was very drippy. The pressing squeezes out even more whey.

After 15 minutes, we took the cheese out (to adjust the cloth) and Noel posed with his future cheese.

Then it was back into the mold with more weight on top.

It'll sit like this until tomorrow morning, when we will turn it over again, then until tomorrow night, when we will remove it from the mold and let it dry out on the counter for a few days, after which we can wax it and set it in the basement to cure.

It's a few months of waiting until we have cheese, but we are pretty excited.