Thinking - Preserves

We bought a induction hotplate a while back, and sometimes fry stuff on it in a place where we also keep jars of things like apricot jam.

It turns out if you lightly spatter your jars with cooking oil, then subject them to the normal vibrations of a house with people moving around and traffic etc, the jar lids work their way loose in time to the point where they are effectively off when you pick up a jar, no matter how tightly you put the lids on.

I love the universe.

It just keeps revealing new bit's I didnt even know it owned.

120ThingsIn20Years thinks stuff is awesome.

Making smoked foods - Cold smoker build

I thought I'd finally be well enough to do something, and thought building the cold smoker experiment should be a good thing to do some of.

So I did.

And it looked like this...

I started with a tap.

Then added all the other metal bits that would fit on it.

I don't really need a tap here, but it will make a good heat sink to take any heat out of my smoke, and dump it into the air.

Then I added a plastic fitting that will take a tube I found.

Then for some reason I cut the stainless steel mesh out of a kitchen strainer.

Next I drilled a hole in the lid of a cheese spread jar. (I don't know why I have a cheese spread jar), and jammed the tap kit through it. 

I also drilled another hole for the "air in" tube.

I mounted the tap in a vice, and made a foil cup to hold the wood chips.

I used Blu-tack to block any holes where the tube met the lid.

I also connected the air hose into the second hose.

I connected a tube to the tap assembly and poked it into a hole in the bottom of this collection jar.

This is where the food, or in this case the salt to be smoked will go.

The sieve was jammed in place at the top of the jar, and filled with large sea salt crystals.

The lid will just rest lightly on this jar to allow the smoke to flow through it freely.

This jar might be replaced with a large olive oil tin or something to smoke other stuff like fish.

So then I lit it, and turned on the air pump.

The air pump pumps air into the glass jar with the wood chips, and the only escape for the air pressure from that jar, is through the pipe under the smouldering wood chips and into the jar with the food in it.

And screwed on the glass jar over the top.

The problem was the air pump didn't put out enough air.

It worked a bit, but there was nowhere near enough smoke.

As soon as the jar was screwed on, the glow died down to a tiny ember.

But it did work and it did make cold smoke.

This is how much was leaving the tube.

It looked like this when thae tube was stuck into the food filled jar.

If you look closely, you can just make out the smoke escaping from the loose fitting lid covering the jar with the salt.

Nowhere near enough, but close enough for a proof of concept.





All I need is a better air pump.



120 Things in 20 years still doesn't know why cold smoke will help make home made preserves, but when I did a search for smoked salt, I see 23,100,000 people have mentioned it already, so I think I can safely say it wasn't an original idea.

Making smoked foods - Cold smoke generator

You can preserve a stack of stuff by smoking it, but I don't know how to make cold smoke. Or at least I didn't.

But this will work.

Sometimes I like to do stuff that's already been done, but without seeing how other people do it.

This is one of those times.

I used to make hot smoked chicken wings in a BBQ kettle or whatever you call such a thing in your part of the world. It's a BBQ with a large domed lid. It's like a grill with a big lid. Whatever...

I would get some heat beads (artificial coal like BBQ fuel that are about the size of a golf ball) and set 3 next to each other with a third on top. This arrangement would allow a heat of only 50 or 60 degrees c but would stay alight.

I'd soak some wood chips in water for a while and then wrap them in foil so they would be starved of air and wouldnt burn. Then Id put the foil package against the heat beads, and would be rewarded with a stack of smoke to impart all the yummyness that smoke does.

But I want to be able to make some cold smoke. I'm not sure why, but I've heard of it.

Rather than just looking up how to do it, I thought I'd invent something.

The result is this...

Picture a glass jar with a plastic lid. (I pictured a peanut butter jar)

Drill two holes in the lid and invert the device from it's native, and more normal peanut butter aspect. (turn it upside down)

Make a foil bowl and hug it into a heatproof tube set through one of the holes. It wont matter if it doesn't seal very well. (I think)

No, I';m sure. It wont matter if it doesnt seal very well.

Now add an air line from your aquaponic system's, or aquarium's air pump into the other hole in the lid.

Fill the foil bowl with wood chips, and light them so there is at least a small bit glowing, then screw on the lid, and start the air pump.

Add a plastic tube to the "cold smoke out" tube, and run that to a container with fish or whatever laid out.

This will.... should.... give an adjustable flow of cold smoke that will keep going for ages, and allow total control of your cold smoke preserved fish or whatever.

The air will come in and build (slight) pressure in the jar. The only way out, will be through the glowing wood chips.

It will work.

I'm going to try to make smoked sea salt. That way I might be able to add smoke flavour at will to whatever I want.




120 things in 20 years lovingly includes things that may well have already been done.

Home made preserves - Latest batch of sun dried tomatoes

This sun drying tomatoes thing has become just another normal activity, and is a really easy and tasty thing to do with excess tomatoes.

Easy.
Child friendly.
Makes nice things to bring to people's houses when you visit.

Get tomatoes.
Cut them in half.
Quickly and un-carefully remove seeds
Put them in the sun.
Store in olive oil.
Eat







120 things in 20 years, blah blah Home made preserves - Latest batch of sun dried tomatoes

Home made preserves - Green tomato chutney build

I have a stack of tired, old, dried, spices that I tend to avoid.

I should throw them out, but instead I like to risk ruining perfectly good food with them.

I started with the perfectly good food.

It included a few green tomatoes, one of which fell from the vine for some unknown reason. It was this act of self harvest that originally made me think to make green tomato chutney.

And an apple and half a very large red onion.

I finely diced the pealed apple...

the red onion...

and the green tomatoes.

I also added some sultanas...

I dropped all the diced fruit and onion into a pan and added around a cup of malt vinegar...

and the contents of the sugar bowl.

Next was some spice.
cinnamon (more than you might think)
white pepper (about what you might think)
tired, old, dried, powdered, ginger (as much as I had)
cayenne pepper (just a bit)
and 3 cloves and two bay leaves that I put in a stainless steal mesh thing for making cups of tea. (to be removed)

and some hot English mustard.

I think that's everything I added.










I put the entire lot on low heat to simmer for an hour or so.

And I have a tip. I came up with it all on my own. I don't know why I had to, as it's the kind of thing my grandmother should have taught me.

But it's this.

If you are like me and tend not to follow recipes, other than a vague guide as to the the flavours and to get a general idea of ingredients, there comes a point where you have to add something, but you don't know how much to add.

Now, it's easy enough to add a bit at a time, but you cant go back from that. ie if after adding, you think "actually it tasted better before" you're in trouble. My tip lets you go back.

It's simply a matter of adding a little of the ingredient into the centre of the pot, and gently stir it in a very local way, so you only mix it with a little of the main mixture. That way you get to taste it as if you added a lot, because its all concentrated in one spot. If it turns out to be too ,much, when you stir it all through the rest of the mixture it dilutes to almost nothing. If it's good, you can add the amount that will make the rest of the mix the same strength.

No doubt it's something people do all the time, but I still invented it :)

Just before removing it from the heat I added some fresh coriander leaves (cillantro?) in the end, it looked like this and tasted really, really good. (my independent taster said "Yep" to the question "Good?".)

Home made preserves - Green tomato chutney

In spite of the endless pruning and sun drying, I can see I'm still going to have too many tomatoes.

I think for my next trick I'll try to make some green tomato chutney. I bought some once and we ate it very quickly, from memory, on cheese sandwiches.

I was going to start picking and making, when I discovered all the recipes that look good, call for apples and a stack of different spices.

I keep a decent supply of spices, but for some reason don't have any apples. So it's going to have to wait until I get some.

Stay tuned.



120 things in 20 years, bringing you nothing really, not even "Home made preserves - Green tomato chutney"

Home made preserves - Sun dried tomatoes success!

Success!

My sun dried tomatoes turned out perfectly.

This is them in some olive oil with a little oregano, some peppercorns, and a few rosemary leaves.

The largest slices took three days, and some of the smaller ones were done after only two.

The original advice I read was to make sure they were all about the same size. No doubt this was to prevent them being ready at all different times.

That was good advice, and the next time I do it I'll try to be more fussy with size.

Also I think I'll be drying them a bit less. I suspect the best home made result would be a semi dried tomato, dried a little more than a dried apricot, but not much more. I'd also only cut the tomatoes in half rather than smaller sections. The halves looked better and had a more even texture.

I think I'll still have spare tomatoes to give away, but from now on I'll be giving them away as sun dried tomatoes.

Rope some kids in to remove the seeds, and make some holiday season presents for the people next door.

All in all a total success. Easy, child friendly, and a great way to value add to left overs. I understand you can also do it in the oven on the lowest heat you can manage, but I think it's more fun to use the sun. In the end I didn't bother with the sieve, because the pests didn't seem interested during the day, but I did bring them in at night to keep the snails away. The first night they were outside, I found snail tracks on the sieve from someone trying to get in, and a small snail or any sized slug would probably have managed to get in and eat the lot.

Home made preserves - Sun dried tomatoes day 1

It actually seems to be working.

After 24 hours the colour is still great and they look like they are well on the way to being sun dried tomatoes.

But I'm currently in the middle of an aquaponics near disaster, so I'm a little too busy at the moment to have much else to say.

Home made preserves - Sun dried tomatoes

In spite of all my pruning and pinching off growing tips to keep my tomatoes from taking over, my two trimmed tomato plants in my little aquaponics garden have been producing tomatoes faster than we can eat them. I've started giving excess tomatoes away but now I've decided to horde them and try my hand at sun dried tomatoes.

If it works well, I'll make a solar drier based on the stuff I learnt from the solar hot water collector experiments I did, but for the time being, I'll knock up a temporary test drier.

I figure I'll need a screen to keep the flies off.

I have a kitchen sieve or two that have so far escaped being destroyed in aquaponics experiments, so I'll use one of those.

And I'll need a couple of tomatoes.

From what I've read, they should be the same size, but I didn't have two ripe ones of the same size so I photographed them to look the same. The closest one is about half the size of the other.

Nobody will know.

So I cut them into sections and thumbed out the seeds.

I pealed two sections as well to try them that way, although it is not normally done that way.

I then found a bowl and a cake cooling rack.

I put the cake cooling rack over the bowl, and spread the tomato sections out over the rack, and put the sieve over the top.

I moved the entire thing out into the sun near an ants nest, so figured I should stand the whole contraption in a big bowl of water to keep crawling things out.

Now we wait. I'm told for a few days.



120 things in 20 years, Home made preserves - Sun dried tomatoes, and waiting

Home made preserves - Success!

I forgot to take a photo of the finished home made preserve.

Then I remembered.

Also, I don't really have enormous teeth.

I cut the shapes out with a spoon for additional drama.

It didn't really work.

But the bits of ginger, and apricot did work.

Home made preserves - Introduction

As usual, I have no idea about how to make things like marmalade, so if you are new here, you might not know to wait for a bit to see if this works. This is more of an experiment than a recipe. So don't try this at home.

During my last drive in the country I visited my bee whisperer friend Buzzy. He likes to think his blackberry jam is a show stopper. In truth it's pretty good, but it isn't set enough and the seeds are a little too hard.

But while I was up that way I went to the Crystal Brook country show. A place where such shows a stopped by show stopping preserves. His wasn't entered, so didn't stop anything.

While we were staying at the bee whisperer's house, were were given a most amazing cake. It was a poppy seed cake with an orange, kind of toffee, glazey, gooey sauce.

Amazing.

My all time best cake eating experience ever.

They cooked it in front of me while we were chatting in the kitchen, but I didn't take any notice, because I had no idea it would actually be good. The sauce seemed to involve a lot of orange juice, and a lot of orange peel as grated zest, and I presume a stack of sugar.

I have a mandarin tree that is overloaded with fruit that didn't quite see enough water when they were forming, and as a result are a little dry. We are eating them daily, but there are so many they are starting to drop to the ground.

I was juicing some of the mandarins this morning to see if they made good juice. Not so good.

All these things, the fact that I'll soon have a stack of things like tomatoes from the aquaponics system, and my natural predisposition to try stuff "my way" before doing the research I should have done in the first place, have led me to the following conclusion.

I'm going to make some preserves.

In fact I've already started.

I also have a juicer

I also have a bread maker, and a fire extinguisher.

It's good to be prepared.

I picked a bowl of excess, woody mandarins.

And found this tired old lemon in the back of my fridge.

In forming an argument against unset blackberry jam being not able to stop shows, I looked up setting jam and found pectin is the go. Its found naturally occurring in packets on supermarket shelves, and in lemons. I didn't find a supermarket in the back of my fridge, but did find an old tired lemon. I don't know how much or which bit of a lemon to add, so I threw in the whole thing.

Zesty!

I forced it all through the juicer, directly into the bread maker holder pan thing.

It all went through with all peel still on.

Zesty?

I dropped in all the sugar I had in the sugar bowl.

Then went and got another bowl and added that as well.

I cant tell you how much of each of these ingredients I used because I have no idea.

And then stated it running on a slow cycle in the bread maker. You need a slow cycle to stop is splashing around all over the shop.

I ran it for an hour, but it still hadn't reduced enough so I've put it on for another hour.

And I've been wondering if I should add some of the pith for some texture, mouth feel, and visual interest.

There's plenty of it, but it also has some seeds mixed in. There are a lot of seeds in my mandarins.







So as I type it's two minutes away from 2 hours total run time in the bread maker. It's still very liquid but is a pretty good rendition of the sauce I was served with the poppy seed cake.

I decided it needed something like apricots, to give it that silky texture as it's a little too much like water. Water as runnyness I can fix, but the pallet is a little too watery. I think apricots might help that, and also add another layer of flavour as it's a little too shallow and really only has "sweet citrus zest" going for it.

But instead I found some sweet ginger, that I thought should work well. I chopped some up to add towards the end so it maintains a little of it's texture.

I'm going to have to do some research to see how much sugar, and how long a cooking time I need to set jam.







- I suggest you sing a little song here, or perhaps go and make a coffee to maintain the real time essence of this blog post while I look some stuff up on the net. -

I found some dried apricots, so diced them up to add when I add the ginger.

[edit from the future - not on the net, I found the apricots in my kitchen]












My sugar research indicates "more" is the answer so I added another bowl.

I have no idea if the sugar is meant to caramelize a bit, but if so this is going to take a lot longer than I thought. There is no sign of any bubbling in my mixture.

Perhaps just a little more research.

But this will work. It already tastes great. and I'm now going to set it running for another hour to reduce it a little.

It's later, and we find ourselves two hours and forty minutes into the mix. I've been testing the jam by dropping a bit on a plate that I've been keeping in the fridge. I do this when I make caramel for popcorn, and it's starting to show signs of setting. When I poke it after it's cooled, it bunches up a bit rather than running away to the other side of the plate. I don't want this to be too thick so I'll let it finish it's last 20 minutes in the bread maker, and call it done.

I'll let it cool and get an independent taster to give an opinion.

It's later still...

------------------------------------------

Me: Try this. (handing over toast and my new jam)

Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years: You made marmalade.

Me: What do you think?

Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years: It's subtle.

Me: Can you review it for me? Perhaps three lines for the blog? You cant use the word "zesty".

Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years: I haven't got that much to say about it to be honest.

Me: Well can I have a one word response?

Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years: It leaves a delicious mandarin after-flavour.

Me: That's not one word.

Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years: Can you leave me alone please.

-------------------------------

Well there you have it "Delicious!", and I agree. It actually worked pretty well.

I'll try to do some research next time, to try to lower your stress levels. The excitement must have been overwhelming watching this unfold in real time.

Much easier than I thought, but not very child friendly [due to high temperatures]. The same process would be perfect for sweet and sour sauces or anything similar. I might have to make my own sweet chilli sauce when my chillies grow up.

All in all totally worth while.