Strawberry Apple Rhubarb Jam

It’s strawberry season here, even though it’s hailing right now where I am. Grown in Queensland and shipped south. Today I bought 6 punnets for $10. Not quite market prices but pretty good for a supermarket. 4 punnets are now jam. I decided to use apples for the pectin, then looked out the window and saw some pickable rhubarb in my garden. A friend calls rhubarb “berry extender”. So that went in as well.

1kg strawberries, washed, hulled and roughly chopped
100g rhubarb washed and finely sliced. Could use more but this was what I had.
400g red gala apples (they were on special), washed, peeled and grated (discarded peel and cores)
4 ice disks lemon juice (~1/4 cup)
1/2 cup water
1kg sugar

Combine prepared fruit, lemon juice and water in a big pot. Bring to a simmer for long enough to soften the fruit. Stir in sugar. Heat gently until dissolved. Increase heat to a boil until set (about 25min today). I think it might be a soft set, which is fine. A bit hard to tell yet while it’s still hot. Love the colour though, which is a little deeper in reality than the picture shows.

Strawberry Sauce and Parfait

It’s a while since I’ve posted food things here. Some of my more experimental recipes get recorded elsewhere. I suppose this blog feels like it’s becoming focussed on fabric, fibre and sewing. I’ll mix it up today with some food.

It’s strawberry season here. I weakened and bought another three punnets a few days ago, so I had to decide on something to turn them into. I settled on a paired set of recipes where one uses the leavings of another, and happily consumes leftover ingredients I happened to have in the house.

 

Strawberry sauce

500g strawberries, washed hulled and halved
200g sugar
~3T lemon juice
the vanilla pod left over from a brewing adventure.
~1/2c white wine

Bring all slowly to a simmer, take off the heat. Mash the fruit until it’s pulpy. Put the lot through a sieve but don’t get too fussy about getting all the juice out. Put the pulp aside and chill it. Put the juice back in the pan and bring back to a simmer for 5min. Bottle into sterilised containers. This made ~400ml.

Strawberry Parfait/Semifreddo

This is inspired by a Cassata recipe much loved by my family. It’s easy and tasty though one needs to be willing to eat uncooked eggs. I make lots of versions of this.

3 egg whites
small pinch salt
heaped half cup icing sugar
1 cup cream
3 egg yolks
the strawberry pulp from above

Beat egg whites with the salt to firm peaks, slowly beat in sugar. Put aside. Beat cream until firm. Beat in egg yolks. Mix in strawberry pulp. Fold together with the egg white mixture. Freeze.

One can stir it during the freezing so that it doesn’t set so hard, or just leave it and serve in slices.

Strawberry Meringues

Success! Strawberry meringues. A version of my magic meringue recipe served to use up the sugar left over from the Strawberry Syrup of a few days ago. The sugar didn’t all dissolve but the resulting treats were definitely worth the effort. They have a delicate pale pink chewy center and do in fact taste of strawberry. Sweet! both literally and figuratively. I’ve already eaten three :-).

200ml white sugar wetted with strawberry juice- take 2T of this and heat in the microwave to hot but not stupid*
1 egg white
2t cornflour
1t white wine vinegar

beat for ~15min, spoon to baking paper**, bake 150C fan forced for 50min

(bah, how do I reduce line spacings? answer: pressing shift+enter gives single line spacing, yay)

*original recipe calls for 2T of boiling water
**or reusable alternative as I prefer

Strawberry Syrup

I have a couple of vocal fans of the strawberry syrup I made a few years ago. Strawbs were down to $1 per punnet the other day so I grabbed some more.

This is 750g strawberries, hulled, quartered and layered with 700g sugar.

After three days under a clean cloth, the mixture looks like this:

Strain that off through a cloth, bottle the resulting liquid, do the bottling boil thing for half and hour and glean ~690ml pretty pink strawberry syrup as pictured at the bottom of this post. The recipe comes from a wonderful book recommended by a friend called “The Barricaded Larder” by Elisabeth Luard.

On the left is the sugar that didn’t dissolve in the strawberry liquid. Last time I think I heated the syrup to get it to combine, but personally I found the last lot too sweet anyway, so I’ve let this stay behind. There is about 300g strawberry wetted sugar. I’m sure I’ll think of something to do with it. There is also the slightly desicated strawberry flesh, which will either get eaten with my morning yoghurt, or combined with that sugar to make something. Thinking cap is vaguely on, except I have a headache from too much WordPressing with the wrong glasses.

The pretty finished syrup:

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Strawberry jam

I went searching for the post from last time I made strawberry jam, but there wasn’t one. So this time there will be. Strawbs were 3 punnets for $4.

I pretty much followed Pam the Jam’s recipe. Except it would seem that English jam sugar is lots weaker than Jamsetta. I used about a quarter of a 50g packet of Jamsetta, plus  I boiled the peels and cores of three pears (from the pear compote I had just prepped) in about 100ml of water and strained off the liquid through a cloth. Otherwise this is 1kg of strawbs, 900g sugar, 100ml lemon juice and Pam’s method. Good colour eh?

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