They smelled like summer and grapes and wonderfulness. The sweet, aromatic smell like a Concord grape, only green.

I tried two different methods for making jam, since I had so many grapes.

First, I separated and washed the grapes and slipped the pulp out of the skins. This released a lot of the juice, as well. The process was incredibly time-consuming and tedious.

I set the skins aside to use later:

I cooked the pulp until the seeds fell out to the bottom of the pan, then put it through a sieve to get them out.

Then I added sugar to half the volume of the pulp, cooked to almost the jelly point, and added in the skins, then had to cook it again. I ended up having to add more sugar and I threw in some lemon to help the pectin set, as well. This ended up with a nice light, bright, very sweet jam.

Green grapes make a light red jam, which seems counter-intuitive but the color comes from the tannins in the skins, which turn red (like in a quince) when they are cooked.

After making the first batch, I still had a ton of grapes. I chose a less work-intensive method.

This time I separated and washed the grapes, then put them, skins and all, in a large pot with an appropriate amount of sugar (about 1/3 by volume) and the juice to two lemons. I let that macerate overnight.

Then I cooked it. When the grapes had pretty much fallen apart, I put the mash through the food mill to remove the seeds. This worked imperfectly, because some seeds were crushed and chunks sent through the mill, but better and faster than hand-skinning each seed by far.

Then I cooked the juice to the jelly point (105C, which is actually 107C on my candy thermometer because of bad calibration).

This cooked the jam down by quite a bit; I started out with 7 quarts of grapes, then after milling I had just over 5 quarts of juice. In the end I got seven pints of jam.

I ran out of one-cup jars and decided against buying even more of them. I had plenty of pint jars, which is a large jar than I usually use for jam, but with grape jam you almost expect abundance and a bigger container, anyway.

I would definitely do the second method again; it worked out very nicely with the combination of work and result. The first method produced a very nice jam, but was not incrementally better than the second.

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

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

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.

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.

I used a recipe from Christine Ferber's phenomenal Mes Confitures (translates to: My Preserves) as a guide. The recipe is for a Gariguette Strawberry preserve, but it adapts well enough to any flavourful strawberry, which our garden strawberries are.

You begin by putting about a kilo (2.2 lbs or so) of cleaned, hulled berries (I put the last day's fresh berries, and the little bricks of frozen berries I had accumulated in together, no thawing) in a non-metallic bowl with the juice of a small lemon and about 850 grams (4 cups to you and me) of sugar. You cover that bowl with a piece of parchment paper (I laid a heavy kitchen towel over the top to keep the paper down), and put it in the fridge overnight to macerate.

24 hours later, I had this:

Yum. I put that in our large saucepan and brought it to a simmer, stirring. Basically, you want to dissolve all the sugar and get a little heat into the strawberries, but not turn them into puree.

Once simmered, you return it to the bowl and put it back in the fridge overnight with the parchment on top.

The next day, you carefully pour the mixture into a sieve and collect the juice. Set the strawberries aside because they are coming back. You boil the juice until it gets to 105C (which is 221F or so; a metric/imperial candy thermometer is a very valuable kitchen tool). When the juice gets there you add back the berries:

And bring it to a boil. You want to boil the jam for about five minutes: long enough to turn the berries translucent and candy-like, but not so long that they start falling apart.

When the five minutes are up, you're supposed to skim the jam. I skipped that step because as I tried it, I kept snagging the berries. Finally I decided I would accept less perfect jam in return for not skimming off half the fruit.

And here we are. I got seven one-cup jars of jam, one a little shy of the 1/4" headspace you are supposed to have. The drippings left behind are wonderful: tart and sweet and full of strawberry flavour.

I've made some other preserves from Mes Confitures, and I must say that this book is a great argument for buying a kitchen scale that measures in grams and a candy thermometer that measures in celsius. While the American translation includes imperial measurements, they are just enough imprecise that you're skirting on the edges of danger in the precise world of fruit preservation.

Now, I was resistant to the idea of a breadmaker. Ten years ago I borrowed one from a friend to see if I wanted to get my own, and found that no, actually what I wanted was a Kitchenaid. So I bought a Kitchenaid and never considered a breadmaker again.

Then our neighbors moved away and gave us their breadmaker. It sat, unused, on a shelf for over a year before I took it to San Luis Obispo so I could have fresh bread there without buying another mixer (though I can see the value in two Kitchenaids, believe me, I had already bought enough duplicate home appliances).

I had a fine high-protein white bread recipe I used for a long time, one that I adapted to not require powdered milk (I hate adding processed foods to my recipes, and powdered milk always tastes sour to me). Then this fall my doctor suggested I cut out white flour and sugar from my diet, or at least cut them down to a minimum. My main source of such refined carbohydrates is bread, so I was in a quandry. I know I will not keep a diet that does not allow me to have bread, but do I want to suffer through finding a decent bread recipe that works?

Which is silly. Before the last hundred years, practically nobody had white flour or sugar, and they all ate really well. There must be both good whole-grain bread recipes and whole-grain cake recipes out there.

Unfortunately, most whole-grain bread recipes for the bread machine suck. People take all the fat out of them to make them "heart-healthy" and that ruins the flavour. So I took a whole wheat bread recipe and made some changes, made a batch, made more changes, and now I have a recipe I like. Here it is:

Whole Wheat Bread
(makes a nominal 1 1/2-pound loaf)

1 cup milk
1 egg
1/3 cup honey
2 tablespoons butter, softened
3 cups whole wheat flour
3 tablespoons gluten
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast

DON'T just add the ingredients to the breadmaker.

First, scald your milk then cool it down so it won't cook the egg. Should you be afraid of scalding milk, just put it in a pan and warm it up on the stove and don't worry about getting it just right; you do not want to put cold milk into this recipe, though. Then you can follow the bread machine's instructions and add everything to the pan. Set the cycle to WHOLE WHEAT.

This makes a nice loaf that's not too sweet, and yet without the bitterness that whole wheat bread can get, also without that heaviness that whole wheat bread uncut by white flour can have (though some would argue that adding gluten is just like adding white flour). It toasts nicely, and is just fine with peanut butter in the morning.

I tested the two juices I had for pectin by putting a tablespoon of each juice in a little mise-en-place bowl and then adding the same amount of rubbing alcohol. This congeals the pectin and shows you what you have to work with. Predictably, the tomato juice had very little pectin:

While the quince juice had lots:

I worked in batches. First I opened the asian pear jelly and cooked that up, adding some pectin (I hadn't added any during the initial cooking). While that was processing in the water bath, I began work on the quince jelly. Noel asked for it to be quite firm, so in addition to the natural pectin I added half a packet of the commercial stuff.

One of the things I love about making jelly is this. You have this sort of cloudy juice that gets even cloudier when you add the sugar:

But then a moment later it clarifies into this shiny clear jelly:

Anyway, I ended up making the tomato jelly very simple: I had four and half cups of juice, to which I added half a cup of cider vinegar, then a packet of no-sugar pectin. That gave me five cups of a very simple, no-added-sugar tomato gel that can be used on meats or as a savoury.

The other theme of this evening was "use up odd ends of jars."

I hate hate hate those wide flat ones at the front: they don't fit nicely in the water bath, they don't work well in the fridge, and even worse, they don't stack nicely on each other: the bottoms are designed so they slide off the stack at the slightest provocation.

Just behind them are the little upright jelly jars, which are quite nice and neat. They're a little bit of a pain to fill because of the narrower mouth, but not bad, and they go in the fridge nicely once opened. And of course they stack properly.

And behind those are the traditional wide-mouth half-pints. Nice jars, very traditional, stack well, and fill easily. They're a bit of a tighter squeeze in the water bath than the little jelly jars, but they work just fine.

Technorati Tags: cooking, jelly

How fine? Well, this one was still flowering like mad when I felled it.

At any rate, I ended up with a bucket full of green tomatoes, and decided to try my hand at green tomato jelly. Don't do a web search for this, because oh god the recipes are horrific, largely involving jello. Since I refuse to use jello that way, I will be working out my own recipe and sharing it here. This time: the juice.

My first step was to wash the tomatoes and remove the bad bits. Mostly the stem ends and any russeting that had occurred. Then I put them in a big pot on the stove and filled it with water to not cover but come close to covering the tomatoes.

Then I simmered. I simmered the tomatoes for about two hours, which may or may not be the case for you. This is not a high-attention simmer: you can leave this on the stove and go fold laundry or work on your architectural thesis as needed. But when it's done, the tomatoes should be soft enough to mush them with a wooden spoon, and the water should be fairly thick with tomato ooginess.

Learning from the quince jelly experience, I put the whole mess through the food mill to make a nice mash. This squeezed quite a bit more juice out of the tomatoes than there would have been.

Then it was the usual jelly business: put the mash in a jelly bag and leave it to drip for about 24 hours. Don't squeeze the bag. If you must squeeze the bag, squeeze it into a separate container and make cloudy jelly with that one.

Here you have the first pour-off of juice: I had so much mashed boiled tomato that I poured the juice off once at the beginning then again at the end. The mash then makes a totally fantastic addition to the compost heap or worm bin.

Next time: flavouring and jellying. I'm still working out ideas for adding some spice to the jelly.

Technorati Tags: cooking, jelly, tomatoes

My juice seemed to have enough pectin (we shall see), so I measured out the same volume of white sugar to add to the juice.

Making this jelly was really easy. I simmered the juice for about five minutes, then added the sugar. Up until this point the juice has been kind of cloudy and strange, and I admit I was a little worried about how perfect it would turn out. But when I added the sugar, it cleared up instantly.

I used a candy thermometer to monitor the jelly's progress: about 30 minutes of boiling brought the juice up to 220F, which is the jellying point around here (we measure our height above sea level in inches hereabouts). You can also test it with a spoon, but to be honest that method has never ever worked for me, while the thermometer seems to do OK.

Then into the nice little 1/2-pint jars, and into the water bath for twenty minutes. Honestly, the most tedious part of the whole thing was cleaning the jars and then keeping them and the lids hot while the jelly boiled up.

3 1/2 cups of juice yielded 5 cups of jelly, very clear and lovely. (I'll add photos to this post when I have a bit more time.)

Technorati Tags: cooking, fruit, jelly

We had a windfall of Asian pears last week: a branch broke off one of the trees and about sixteen small pears were orphaned. Asian pears do not ripen off the tree, so there was nothing to it but to make jelly. But where do you find a recipe? When a fruit sells for $2.30 a pop, not many people buy flats of it for jellying. So I've been adapting jelly recipes for pears and apples to make a recipe for Asian pears.

The key with Asian pears is that their flavour is very subtle. Add any extra flavours, and you'll lose the fruit. So you have to go lightly on the lemon, and while I have seen suggestions of vanilla, rum, and other flavourings, I'm not convinced they are a good idea. This light flavour is why I decided to make jelly rather than jam. Jelly is clear, jiggly, and can be much more delicate. It does have to be made in two parts: first you make the juice, then you make the jelly, but you can let quite a bit of time pass between the two stages.

So let's start with the fruit. I washed the pears, then quartered them and removed stems and the furry fruit ends. The seeds and cores got to stay, because they are full of pectin and I'm making jelly, not jam.

Then I chopped a few pieces up into smaller slices and spread them on the bottom of the pot. This keeps the fruit on the bottom from burning before it starts giving up juice. Maybe it's just a superstition, but it's always worked best for me with apple jellies.

I had a lot of fruit; more than really fit nicely into one pot. So I divided it into two pots for the juicing. You add some water: as little as possible, though the amount will depend on your pot. Don't worry about adding too little; you can always add more later, but don't be ridiculous. The water helps extract juice from the fruit. In this photo you can see the glint of the water level though the fruit. That was just enough water for this pot.

In contrast, this pot was a bit shy on the water, even though it had a greater proportion of water to fruit to start out with.

The process of removing the juice takes a while. My pots took about an hour of boiling, and the nice thing about this stage is that I didn't have to be right there the whole time. You start out at low heat until the fruit starts sort of sweating, then turn it up and cook until the fruit is very soft: my measure was that I could stick the wooden spoon through every piece of fruit with minimal effort. Then you strain the mash in a jelly bag.

Our jelly bag is a fine cotton pillowcase. You can also buy a purpose-made jelly bag, or make one from a nice piece of cloth. The pillowcase works for me because it's approximately the right size and it already exists.

It's clean, obviously, but I also boil it for about ten minutes beforehand to get it closer to sterile. The boiling also gets it wet, which means it won't absorb all of your juice before dripping the rest into the bowl. This is key.

I put the jelly bag in a metal strainer for support (you can also tie it and hang it from a hook if you have such a setup, and I have elaborate fantasies about a pulley system that will probably never come to pass), set on top of a bowl and then set aside in the kitchen. Overnight is about as long as required to filter the juice. Don't squeeze the bag, as much as you are tempted.

When the dripping is done, you can get another bowl and squeeze the bag into that bowl: it will make a cloudier, less fine jelly, but it's lots of fun. Actually, with Asian pears, this is less exciting than with fruit like raspberries, which are naturally very juicy. But go for it.

At this point, you can continue on to making the jelly, or you can bottle up the juice and store it in the refrigerator for up to a month. Or you can freeze it for six months, or you can can it in sterile jars like jelly, although I admit that when I consider that option it gets low ratings because if you're going to bother with all the fuss of sterilizing the jars and getting the water bath ready, you might as well make the jelly right away.

Being somewhat short on time, I opted to bottle the juice up and put it in the refrigerator. So Part Two will be about the jellying itself.

Technorati Tags: cooking, fruit, jelly

We went there for brunch on Sunday. Let's start with the water glasses: mine had a big old piece of greenery stuck to its side, and somehow our waiter never noticed, not during the entire meal, even when I pointedly put it in the middle of the table with the leaf facing the spot where he was standing.

And then there's the French. Les Halles is a French restaurant, one might assume, from the French name, the menu written entirely in French, that sort of thing. So I placed my order using the French names of the dishes, as listed in the menu. The waiter did not understand, and then finally had to be told the names in English. It's not as if the menu was that complicated, either.

Not that we saw a lot of our waiter. He hardly graced our table during the time were were there, which was quite a while on account of how long he took checking on us.

Then my salad, which was nice, but the leaves were a bit large for eating whole. I had no table knife, just a steak knife. Of course, apart from that, the salad was magnificent: a perfectly balanced vinaigrette with the right amount of salt, nice choice of vegetables.

Then I went to butter my bread. No butter knife. And of course, no table knife, either. So I used my steak knife, which was a bit weird.

When my second course, Ouef Benedicte (excuse me, eggs Benedict) arrived, I was very happy with the quality of the food. A perfectly poached egg, a creamy, smooth Hollondaise, nice high-quality Canadian bacon (not the grocery store stuff, thank goodness). The accompanying french fries were cooked to perfection, perfectly salted. I was a touch surprised that we were not offered any sort of sauce for them, be it ketchup or mayonnaise.

Some very long time later, when we had been staring at our empty plates for twenty minutes or more, our waiter reappeared and for the first time was prompt and attentive as he fetched the check for us.

The quality of food was really first class. If that's all that matters to you, Brasserie les Halles is a great restaurant. However, the service and the attention to detail in the table setting leaves a lot to be desired. We are unlikely to return; great food is not so hard to find in New York.

Technorati Tags: restaurants

And the food. It was as if a French-trained chef was trying to do Italian, and utterly failing. My olives/fresh mozzarella/tomato/basil "mezze" (can we just call it an appetizer and get over ourselves) needed more balance to keep the mozzarella from being totally dominated by the olives, and you would think that in California, in August, they could have found some good tomatoes to put on the plate. Noel's cumin bread had just too damned much cumin. The four-cheese ravioli in tomato/basil sauce was utterly ruined by probably four times as much black pepper as any tomato sauce ever needs; the chef clearly did not understand how stewing changes spices.

I will grant that they understood both butter and salt, which is rare, and the toasted sesame seeds made a real difference for Noel's chicken in phyllo, but quite frankly, that's not enough for the prices they were charging. For a few dollars more, we could have had an infinitely better meal at Chez Panisse, and been treated politely. We will not be going back.

Technorati Tags: alameda, restaurants