Posted: 9/23/2010 4:25:12 PM EDT
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/dining/22appe.html?_r=1&hpw
Spiking Summer Fruit in Order to Preserve It By MELISSA CLARK Published: September 21, 2010 At the end of every summer, as the heaps of fresh fruit start to dwindle at the farmers’ markets, the urge to preserve it all pulls strong. Related Recipes Usually, I suppress it. As much as I love the idea of a pantry full of homemade jams, jellies, pickles and syrups, I rarely have the patience for serious canning, with its macerating, simmering and sterilization of jars. But there is another, easier way: boozy fruit. There are many incarnations but the basic premise is the same — simply mix fruit and sugar with enough hard spirit to keep the fruit well soused, and let it sit. You can sip the liquid as a cordial and eat the sweet, spiked fruit over ice cream or cake. Apart from freezing, it is about the simplest preserving method there is. And not surprisingly, it’s lately become somewhat of a trend among the legion of D.I.Y. canners, locavores and fervent gardeners looking to make the most of seasonal produce. For Amy Pennington, a professional gardener in Seattle and the author of “The Urban Pantry” (Skipstone, 2010), using booze to preserve fruit is just one more “branch in the preservation tree.” “There’s drying, salting, canning and using alcohol, which kills bacteria, meaning you don’t need to futz around with creating an anaerobic environment,” she said, adding that preserving with alcohol is the “lowest rung of entry for beginning canning enthusiasts” because it’s hard to mess up. She’s used the technique to preserve raspberries in vodka, which she plans to churn into sorbet, and greengage plums in brandy, to bake into an upside-down gingerbread cake as soon as they are ready — in, oh, about three months. That’s the downside to putting up boozy fruit. Unlike making jam, which you can eat right off the stove, putting up fruit in alcohol is the slow road to dessert. The raw spirit and fruit need some time to get acquainted, traditionally from the end of summer harvest until Christmas. Perhaps the best example of following seasons in a boozy fruit mix is rumtopf — a German preserve that spans the entire growing season. Classic recipes have you start in June by mixing strawberries with sugar and rum. As other fruits ripen, they are added in layers, then the whole thing is left to mellow until Christmas. Although the fruit mix is usually laid down in one large crock, Kelly Cline, a food stylist, photographer and fourth-generation rumtopf-maker in Seattle, likes to put up small batches of single-fruit rumtopfs, like nectarines or blackberries, often laced with spice. “I know I’m bastardizing the tradition of my great-grandfather, but sometimes I like to celebrate the flavor of just one fruit,” she said. When it’s ready, she serves the fruit in a large bowl and lets her guests nibble the rum-imbued pieces as they please. “They’re like edible cocktails.” she told me. “People get smashed.” The delight of a tipsy buzz is yet another reason to make rumtopf instead of jam. After moving to Berlin, Luisa Weiss, a former cookbook editor and blogger at The Wednesday Chef, received several serving suggestions for the rumtopf she is currently making, including mixing it into yogurt for breakfast — an idea bestowed by her friend, a surgeon. Arguably, boozy fruit also makes a more exciting homemade gift than other preserves. That’s one of the things that lured Amy Cleary, a canning aficionado and a publicist at University of California Press, into the process. Over the years, she’s made boozy fruit out of cherries, peaches, plums, apricots and cranberries and given much of it away to impressed friends. “You can go to the store and buy pretty good jam, but you’re not going to find brandied apricots,” she said. The low-labor, high-value gift factor persuaded me to finally give it a try. I went to the farmers’ market and gathered peaches, nectarines, raspberries, plums, Concord grapes and even late strawberries. Then I swung by the liquor store and stocked up on brandy, rum and gin. (Any high-proof spirit will work, but these appealed to me the most.) Finally, I stopped by the supermarket to buy jars. On my way out, I snagged several pomegranates, which a friend told me her mother used to preserve with vodka or Korean soju. Then I got it all home and filled jars with fruit, sugar and spirits, mixing and matching as I saw fit, topping the grapes and plums, separately, with brandy, the pomegranate with gin, and tossing the rum and the rest of the fruit together into a rumtopf-manqué. By December, if everything turns out as well as I hope, I will have gifts for my friends. But there is a chance I might go the way of Julia Sforza, who blogs about making preserves at What Julia Ate. “I got tiny apricots from my local orchard and preserved them with brandy,” she said. “They were delicious; each one was like a shot. They were going to be Christmas presents, but were so good, I couldn’t bear to give them away.” Instead, her friends got jam. |
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Quoted:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/dining/22appe.html?_r=1&hpw Spiking Summer Fruit in Order to Preserve It By MELISSA CLARK Published: September 21, 2010 .............. That’s the downside to putting up boozy fruit. Unlike making jam, which you can eat right off the stove, putting up fruit in alcohol is the slow road to dessert. The raw spirit and fruit need some time to get acquainted, traditionally from the end of summer harvest until Christmas........................... Hence "Christmas Peaches" (soaked for months in shine.) This would actually make for a good addition to the "DIY Christmas presents" thread. |