Cardamon & Star Anise Preserved Pears

delicately spiced these store cupboard gems will lead you on all kinds of culinary journeys….

3 Kilos of hard pears (must be hard)
2 lemons – juiced (do save the zest for other things – freeze it)
450g sugar
2 litres water
2 – 4 star anise
4 – 6 cardamom pods
2 sticks cinnamon
2 bay leaves

gadgets & gizmos

One very large jar or several smaller jars. I often make them “serving size” so think about your family and choose jars that will take say 2 or 4 or 6 half pears as a half pear is a good serving guide.

How To

Acidulate a bowl of water with the juice of the lemons. Dont forget this step as this keeps the pears a beautiful bright colour by halting the oxidation process. Plus we will recycle this lemony water into the syrup!
Peel, core, and quarter the pears. This is tedious and as the pears are hard they can be a tad difficult to peel. Add them to the acidulated water as soon as you peel and core a portion of pear.
In a large saucepan add the sugar, acidulated water, and spices. Bring to a boil quite fast because the pear pieces can only sit around so long outside the lemon bath. As soon as a little vapour rises from the syrup plunge the pears into the syrup. Let come to a boil again, cook for 5 minutes.
Pack the jars with the pears. This is where you can indulge your inner pear packing nerd and stack them up neatly. In fact the bigger the jars the easier this is. I insert just one or two star anise and cardamon pods inside. Pears have a subtle flavour and we dont want to overwhelm them.

Pour the remaining syrup over the pears to cover, leaving a little space approx 1cm of headroom from the tops of the jars. Put on the lids.
Now water bath them and this is important. If you do not do this they may ferment and they certainly will not keep at room temperature. Either use a bain marie or better for tall jars, your biggest deepest saucepan. Boil in water for 20 minutes.

Leave for a few days to let the syrup infuse.

Ideas and Improvs

Use in crumbles, in frangipane tarts, with a vanilla tart, to acompany blue cheese or just served with a delicious home made custard laced with brandy in winter to warm you up!

Sea Buckthorn (“catina”) & Orange Seedless Jam

Iridescent magic with good butter and home made bread….

Catina berries (and the Romanian word is just so much prettier and less cumbersome so I have adopted it) are available on roadside stalls and in markets all over Romania in the autumn. They are the European Goji berry and when cooked (being pretty revolting raw unless doused liberally in honey ) take on slightly passion fruity flavours. I like how they respond well to a touch of citrus but not so much as to overpower the pure catina flavour.

i decided to apply the same method as for seedless redcurrant jam, something we Brits confusingly call redcurrant jelly…. I was very pleased with the results. I am still tinkering around with adding some apple puree and juice and will see how that works out – for now this is the neat version…in all senses.

Gadgets and Gizmos

The food mill really does make a difference. Hard to think how else to make a good puree. The seeds are pretty big and bitter so blitzing would be a disaster.

Ingredients

a quantity of catina (sea buckthorn) berries – 3kg will yield approx 20-24 medium jars

1 orange – juice and zest

sugar – probably 2.5kg but you need to weigh your fruit pulp…all in the How To

How To

1. Boil your berries lightly in just enough water to cover them. Approximately 20 minutes

2. Pass them through a food mill to obtain a puree with the water they were boiled in.

3. Weigh the resulting puree and add the orange juice but not the zest.

4. Add the same weight of sugar as your puree.

5. Boil to obtain a set. See The Jam Making Rules.

6. Add the orange zest

7. Jar in hot sterilised jars.

Fragrant Poached Quinces & Quince Jelly

The colour red

Quinces being a member of the rose family are naturally perfumed so to add aromatics to them might seem a little too much but this works beautifully – the star anise, the vanilla, the bay and the cinnamon all accentuating the quinces natural flavour.

I used to go to a restaurant in Beyoglu in Istanbul where the bottled poached quince were stacked up in enormous jars to last the winter and where they were used for the simple but delicious “kaymakli ayva tatlisi” (poached quinces in sugar syrup served with buffalo clotted cream). This was the inspiration behind my fragrant version and my “Bosphorous Afternoon Tea”…. these quinces, fresh scones, little glasses of dark sweet Turkish tea, “kaymak” and that view. Magic.

And as for that colour? how can something that starts off looking like an apple and a hard unforgiving apple at that end up a deep crimson red? The quince is unique in that it responds well to “over” cooking and in fact changes colour as it cooks. The longer it cooks the deeper the colour.

Ingredients

2kgs quinces (if they are furry just rub the fur off with a damp cloth)
1 kg sugar
2 litres of water
4 star aniseed
2 cinnamon batons
2 vanilla sticks
2 bay leaves

Gadgets & Gizmos

A casserole dish or heavy bottomed saucepan with a well fitting lid.

How To

Set the oven to 150C
Peel the quinces and halve them. Remove the core or if you want to you can do this part later when the fruit is soft.
DO NOT THROW AWAY THE SKIN AND CORE! put that all in with the fruit as this is full of valuable pectin!
Put all the ingredients in the pan and bring to the boil
Once the mixture has boiled place in the oven
Check periodically on the colour and softness. They are done when they are a nice rosy red and a knife slices through easily. Approx 4-6 hours. they are better if left overnight as they will take on more of the aromatics. Use to make a crumble, tarte tatin or just eat with cream the Turkish way or ice cream or custard or yoghurt.

KEEP THE SYRUP THAT YOU DO NOT EAT COMPLETE WITH THE PEEL AND CORES TO MAKE JELLY.

Quince Jelly

This jelly already has some sugar added as it started life as a light 2:1 syrup. Quinces are higher in pectin than even apples so now we can take this syrup and add some water. here is my recipe for this particular syrup made from the poached fruit.

Measure the syrup from the poached fruit. Lets say you have 500ml of syrup.

Add 75% of the quantity of water. This would be 375ml.

Add the juice of 1 lemon (strictly not necessary from the pectin point of view but I like how citrus adds bright notes to jams and jellies) for every litre approx of juice and also keep the zest for the same reason.

Add 80% sugar to your liquid. here you would add 80% x 875 so 700g sugar

Boil until setting point – see Jam Sessions – Rules for making jam

Add the lemon zest just before potting in hot sterilised jars.

You will have a beautiful bright fragrant jelly.