Here we are, in the midst of the snowpacalypse, and my patience for winter is running out. I’ve been dreaming of warm, sunny places where it doesn’t snow 24″ every other month. I’ve been eating marmalade out of the jar and downing tropical fruit left and right, but clearly, it was time to step it up a notch….so I’ve moved on to virtual vacations. Given my fondness for both the Iberian Peninsula and salt, was it inevitable that I turned to salt cod?
This is a fairly basic salt cod stew from Simon and Inés Ortega’s wonderful 1080 Recipes. If you haven’t seen this book and are curious about what Spaniards eat at home (as opposed to in tapas bars), you’ve got to check it out. Part of what I love about it is that the translation to English is pretty much limited to language and measurements—I can think of few things less likely to appear in an American cookbook than “Lambs’ feet fritters” or “Pickled Partridges.” Other recipes, though, are eminently doable and made for improvisation. I was very, very happy with this recipe. The stew turned out sort of like a Spanish bouillabaisse, or maybe a thin Manhattan chowder, and the cooked salt cod ends up with a texture not unlike lobster.
Salt cod may be a bit hard to come by in certain parts of the country, but I’ve had good luck finding it in ethnic groceries, urban supermarkets, and Philadelphia’s Italian Market. Unless you’ve made your own salt cod, no points here for seasonal or local, but the rest of the ingredients are more virtuous.
Salt Cod Stew (paraphrased and lightly adapted from 1080 Recipes)
1 lb or package of boneless salt cod
2 T olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 pint home-canned tomatoes or roasted tomatoes
springs of bouquet garni herbs: lavender, thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf
2 lbs potatoes, in thick slices
6 c. fish stock (optional)
pinch of saffron
handful chopped parsley
1) The night before you make the stew, start soaking the salt cod in a tray or dish. Change the water at least four times—the more you change the water, the less salty it will be.
2) Cook the onions in the oil in a soup pot for about five minutes, until translucent. Add the garlic and stir 30 seconds more. Add the tomatoes and their juices and cook another 5 minutes. Add about 6 cups of water or fish stock, the herbs (except the saffron), and the potatoes. Bring to a boil, turn the heat down, and start simmering.
3) Meanwhile, crush the saffron in a small bowl, then dissolve it in a bit of the hot stock. Add the mixture to the pot and simmer about 20 minutes.
4) Cut the salt cod in about 1″ pieces, removing any stray bones. Transfer to the soup pot and cook another 10 minutes. Taste for seasoning—it most likely won’t need salt, but a little pepper is nice. Throw in some chopped parsley for garnish.
I can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t be able to make this in the crock pot, except that it might get too salty if you didn’t soak the salt cod properly. If anyone has tried that successfully, please let me know!
Attention all canjammers! The focus of the February Tigress Can Jam is CARROTS.
Got that?
Yes, carrots.
The Tigress and I made this choice with both excitement and trepidation. The excitement because vegetables are new territory for many water-bath canners; the trepidation because carrots are a low-acid food, and therefore come with certain rules. So. Let’s be clear. No matter what you find on the internets, you absolutely have to add acid to carrots to make them safe to can. In fact, a lot of acid. So much acid, in fact, that the Tigress and I strongly encourage you—nay, insist!—that you start off with a published recipe, and tweak from there. (If you have a home pH meter and/or are a master food preserver, you get a free pass.) Think pickles, relishes, and chutneys. Once you’ve found a recipe you like, feel free to tinker with the spices, the balance of salt and sugar, the exact combination of vegetables, etc. HOWEVER, be sure that you are not reducing the proportion of acid to the food.
Let’s give an entirely hypothetical (as in, don’t try this at home) example. Say you have a recipe that includes 5 cups of carrots, 2 cups of cauliflower, a handful of herbs, 1 T of salt, 1/4 c. of sugar, and 3 cups of vinegar. It would be fine to reduce the cauliflower to 1 cup and add 1 cup of peppers, throw in some mustard seeds, and add more sugar. It would not be OK, though, to just add a cup of peppers without adding more vinegar, because then you’ve lowered the acid content (that is, raised the pH).
Um, if this is at all confusing, that means you should stick with the recipe.
Have fun, be careful, and remember to post your fabulous creations between Sunday, February 14 and midnight, Friday, February 19.
Libby, over at Cafe Libby, is the lucky winner of the strawberry lemon marmalade (random number 34). But don’t worry: I’ve bought two dozen 4-oz jars just so I can start giving more of these tasty treats away. Stay tuned for February!
Herewith begins my contribution to the Tigress Can Jam! If you’ve missed it, the canjam is a yearlong canning challenge. Each month, canjammers will be asked to create a water-bath friendly recipe based on a seasonal ingredient. Tigress started us off gently, with citrus. I assumed—rightly as it turns out!—that this would turn into a giant marmalade fest, so I was looking for something just a little bit off-center. I found my inspiration in the freezer: a bag of sugared strawberries I put away last May. Technically, I guess that means I’m in violation of the seasonality rule, but given that these were local berries that I picked and stored myself, I hope you’ll agree that it’s in the spirit of the game.
I *love* the way this turned out. I started with a recipe in the Ball Blue Book, but reduced the sugar (I wanted it tarter), added more lemons, kept the peels, and eliminated the pectin…which makes it not really a Blue Book recipe at all. It’s more in the spirit of the tangerine marmalade I made last month, but with lemons and strawberries instead. Now, if you do the Twitter Thing, you’ll know that sugar has recently been a subject of much controversy. I tell you, people: yes, you can reduce the sugar in a marmalade. The safety question in water-bath canning is about acid. Lemons and strawberries have plenty of acid. As both the National Center for Home Food Preservation and the Ball Corporation’s Fresh Preserving Guide make clear, it is not a safety issue to reduce the amount of sugar in fruit preserves. Now, this is not to say that sugar isn’t a preservative—it is, my friends, it is!—but preservation is fundamentally a different question than safety. Sugar preserves taste and helps you get to the gelling point faster. It also prevents mold, which is why jams and preserves that are high in sugar will last longer once you’ve opened them. Sometimes low-sugar preserves aren’t as pretty as high-sugar preserves, and they often have a softer set. Some people, such as the USDA, say that you need to process low-sugar foods longer than high-sugar foods. (But keep in mind that the French don’t process their canned jams at all, and they’re still here.) In this case, though, there’s so much pectin in the lemons that I achieved an excellent set, without pectin and with less sugar than the recipe called for. And since the product is mostly lemons, it’s plenty acidic.
Tweaking canning recipes is a topic that gets plenty of food educators exercised. Those who object are, quite rightly, concerned about your safety. There is a growing consensus among some in the “new” canning community, however, that some of these rules are a tad too rigid. The spirit of the canjam is to improvise within the limits of safety. Part of the challenge of this exercise is to figure out what you can change (spices, fruit combinations, sweeteners) and what you can’t. If you change the recipe, there is, in fact, a chance that something will go wrong. Maybe your jam won’t set. Maybe it will grow mold in 3 months. But you know what? If you see mold, throw it out. Live and learn. And if you’re worried about botulism, don’t, so long as you’re working in a high-acid (i.e., fruit-filled) environment. My personal opinion is that the USDA rules should be taken as a guideline, not as hard and fast rules. Keep in mind that the USDA also recommends that you not eat raw fish or raw eggs, and that meat should be cooked through. Nevertheless, for the record, when you change a recipe, you are doing so at your own risk.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to business!
Strawberry Lemon Marmalade
1 qt frozen strawberries, in sugar
4 medium lemons, chopped
3 c. sugar
about 3 c. water
1) Wash your lemons. Slice them as thinly as possible, then chop them into pieces. Put them into your jam pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, and simmer 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the pan cool. Put a lid on the pan and walk away. Meanwhile, take your berries out of the freezer.
2) The next day, mash the berries and their juices (I use a potato masher). Toss them into the pot along with the sugar. Bring to a boil. Boil it until you’re just at the gelling point. Be careful: there at the end, it gets quite thick rather quickly, and my last jar is a bit thicker than I might like. There’s *lots* of pectin in the pith.
3) Meanwhile, sterilize 4 or 5 half-pint jars and bring your water bath to a boil. Heat new lids. Transfer the hot jam to the hot jars and adjust the two-piece lids. Process in a boiling-water bath canner for 10 minutes.
My version made 4 half pints and 1 4-oz jar, which I’m giving away! Leave a comment by Monday at 8 AM and I’ll select a winner by random number generator. Happy canning!
Last week I tried to make my favorite yellow split pea dal in my crockpot. It was an utter FAIL. Really and truly nasty—by the time the peas were finally edible (sort of), they had turned a disgusting brownish green color, which is why I’m skipping the photo. However, dear readers, I want to spare you the same miserable experience.
My problem, it turns out, is that I added turnip greens at the beginning, right along with the split peas, the potatoes, etc. Although we don’t think of them as such, it turns out that turnip greens are quite high in acid. The acid, in turn, makes it difficult for the split peas to absorb water. How difficult? Well. Let me tell you. These split peas—pre-soaked, mind you!—were still hard as rocks after 8 hours in the crockpot, at which point I turned it to low and we went out for pizza at our local brew pub instead. I let it cook overnight. The peas were still mostly hard the next morning, but by now the mixture had started to turn an alarming color. Determined not to waste food, I decided to pressure cook the whole thing. Five minutes at 15 pounds pressure did virtually nothing to the peas. After another 10 minutes, they were starting to soften, but still not done. Finally, after another 10 minutes at 15 pounds of pressure, they were finally soft enough to eat. They were also not very pretty.
The end product was edible, sort of, if you smother a bowl of the stuff with yogurt and chutney. But it is not something I will repeat.
The lesson? Only add acidic things (tomatoes, greens, lemon juice, etc.) to legumes after they’re cooked. This is the logic that explains, among other things, why recipes for baked beans usually either have you start with cooked beans or include a cooking time of several hours. Great mysteries revealed!
Now, to be honest, I’ve often had trouble getting beans soft in the crockpot, which is one of oh-so-many reasons I usually prefer the pressure cooker instead. How does this work, exactly? What tricks do you use?
A belated Happy New Year to all! I am finally beginning to unfurl from my winter break hibernation. What better way to start the new year, I thought, than with a canning double feature: beef stock AND beef-vegetable soup? As an added bonus, the soup is the perfect vehicle for any number of vegetables that you froze or even canned last summer. If you planned ahead, this is a total local foods/seasonal winner…and it means that you’ll have jars of delicious, warming soup ready for cold days.
One note: you will save time if you make the soup and the stock together, but it will require some coordination and several large pans. You will also need a large pressure canner, not just a small pressure cooker. For the difference, see this refresher post on pressure cooking 101. And remember, kids: it is not remotely safe to attempt to can meat products in a water-bath canner. Don’t even try it.
You’ll work in several steps. First, you’ll make the stock. Then, you’ll make the soup. Next, you’ll can both the soup and the stock at the same time. You’ll want to assemble your soup vegetables while the stock is cooking in the pressure cooker. Then, when you’re warming up the soup, clean out the pressure cooker so it’s ready to use to can the jars. Got it?
Beef Stock
1–3 pounds beef bones (the more you use, the richer the stock)
1 or 2 small onions, cut in half
2 cloves garlic
some leek parts (rescued from my freezer morgue)
2 carrots, scrubbed if organic, peeled if not, cut into 2 or 3 pieces
2 stalks celery, cut into 2 or 3 pieces
A few sprigs of parsley
1 t salt
6 peppercorns
A bay leaf of two
1) Throw everything into a large pressure cooker with 6 quarts of water. Remember, if you want a richer stock and only have 1 pound of beef bones, just use less water.
2) Lock the lid and bring the pressure cooker up to 15 pounds pressure. Cook for 20 minutes (if your bones are frozen, cook it longer). Let the pressure release of its own accord.
3) Drain the stock through a large colander into another pot. Remember, it needs to be big enough to hold 6 quarts of liquid. If you plan to make a soup, rescue the carrots, celery, and meat parts from the food bits and set them aside. Discard everything else.
4) If you want to freeze your stock, transfer it to freezer-safe containers and stop here. If you want to can it, keep reading.
Beef Vegetable Soup
1 1/2 quarts beef stock
Meat bits from the bones
2 carrots (salvaged from the stock), cut into pieces
2 stalks celery (salvaged from the stock), cut into pieces
1 quart jar homemade canned tomatoes, in water or juice
1 quart bag frozen corn
1/2 quart bag frozen green beans, cut into pieces
1/2 quart bag frozen greens (beets, turnip, kale, etc.)
1 potato, cut into cubes
1 turnip, cut into cubes
1) Put everything in a big soup pot (note you’ll still have another stockpot full of stock, so you’ll need a second big pan) and bring to a simmer. Just simmer it for 15 minutes. Some of the vegetables may still be hard, but don’t worry about it—you’re going to pressure cook them, after all.
2) Meanwhile, prepare a total of 6 or 7 quart jars for canning. They don’t have to be sterile, but they should be clean. Heat the lids. Clean out the pressure cooker and put a rack in the bottom of it. Have 2 quarts of water boiling on a separate burner.
3) Transfer the soup to the jars. Adjust the two-pieces lids and transfer the jars to the pressure cooker. ****If you’re also canning beef stock, fill those jars and put them in the pressure cooker at the same time. Add the boiling water to the pressure canner. Note to experienced water bath canners: it is not necessary for the water to cover the jars. It’s only there to create steam.
4) Cover and lock the lid. Evacuate the steam for 8 minutes (this means run it without the regulator—see the picture below):
5) CAREFULLY set the regulator on the vent. Process quarts 1 hour 25 minutes at 10 pounds pressure, or pints 55 minutes. After the pressure drops of its own accord, let the pressure cooker sit another 10 minutes or so before opening. Cool and label. These will keep in a cool, dark, place for about a year.
Canning Beef Stock
What’s that? You don’t like vegetable soup? No problem. Just can the stock on its own. Beef stock only needs 25 minutes for quarts or 20 minutes for pints, both at 10 pounds pressure. The longer time above is simply to take advantage of the fact that you’re running the pressure cooker anyway, and a little extra time for the stock won’t hurt a thing.
Happy Holidays, blogworld! I’m mostly on blog holiday this week, waiting for the Great Can Jam of 2010 to begin next week. Meanwhile, if you’ve been reading our feed, please check out our redesigned site, with more information about cooking and canning classes and the Farmer’s Daughter Restaurant and Café. (And if I use this week off wisely, the Farmer’s Daughter should have its own real Web site reeeeeeeeal soon. Patience, folks.) We’ve also added a bookshelf with a few of our favorite kitchen resources.
Thanks so much for your support, your comments, and your interest in modern homesteading! Here’s hoping for a happy and bountiful new year.
There are some spectacular onion confits and jams floating around the internets right now. This one is an onion and rosemary confiturra from Serious Eats, via The Kitchn, that I heard about through a round-up post on Consider the Pantry (got that?). It’s a luscious combination of red onions, balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, white wine, honey, sugar, and herbs. The recipe is perfect—I didn’t change a thing—but I do want to say a word about preservation. Serious Eats says that this is fine for water-bath canning. I’m not convinced.
Here’s my logic. Onions are a low-acid food. To make them safe for water-bath canning, you have to add sufficient vinegar to drive the pH below 4.6. The question is whether there is enough vinegar in this recipe. If you have pH strips handy, then you could just find out, and proceed accordingly. If you don’t, however, you have to do some sleuthing.
Two things made me nervous. First, while Joy of Cooking includes a similar recipe for what they call “red onion marmalade,” it’s not included in their list of condiments safe for canning. But it was what I found in the Ball Blue Book that really convinced me. The Blue Book includes two different recipes for preserved onions: one for water-bath canning, and one for pressure canning. Their red onion marmalade, safe for water-bath canning, has a ratio of 1 1/2 c. onions to 1/4 c. vinegar, plus some orange peel and a whole lot (4 cups!) of sugar. The red onions with honey recipe, on the other hand, has 2 1/2 quarts onions, 1/2 c. wine, and 1 c. honey, and must be pressure cooked. Serious Eats’ confiturra has about 10 cups of onions, 3/4 c. vinegar, and 1/2 c. wine, but by the Blue Book logic, you would need 1 2/3 c. vinegar for 10 cups of onions. Given that the Blue Book is known to be conservative, it strikes me as within the realm of the possible for 3/4 c. of vinegar to be enough, but since I’m giving these as gifts, I wanted to play it safe. Fortunately, since this is a heavily cooked product anyway, there’s no harm in pressure canning the jars.
All of which is a long way of saying: if you want to preserve a low- to moderate-acid onion confit, pressure can the jars at 10 pounds for 15 minutes. If you don’t have a pressure canner, they’ll keep in the refrigerator for at least a month. As a reminder, I’ve got step-by-step pressure canning instructions here.
Apparently great minds think alike. Yesterday morning I made a big batch of tangerine marmalade, as, apparently, did the folks at Put Up or Shut Up! The ingredients are pretty similar (there are only so many ways to combine tangerines and sugar), but there’s still plenty of variety in the technique. Pros of their version: the use of a microwave speeds things up. Pros of my version: none of this pesky “peeling” business. That’s right: I use rind, pith, and all. I hereby guiltily confess that in all the time I’ve made marmalade, or any preserve involving a whole lemon, it’s never occurred to me to actually peel the thing. I suppose if you were using something very pithy, like a naval orange or a grapefruit, it would be a good idea—but with tangerines, no problem.
This tastes like pure sunshine. A great gift, obviously.
Tangerine Marmalade
3 pounds tangerines
2 small lemons
1 1/2 c. water
4 1/2 c. sugar
1) Chop the tangerines, peel and all. I do this by hand, so as to remove the seeds. If you’re using a seedless variety, then by all means use the food processor. Repeat with the lemons.
2) Combine the tangerines, the lemons, and the water in a pot. Bring rapidly to a boil; simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover, and let sit 12 to 18 hours.
3) Add the sugar (or more, if you like a sweeter marmalade) and bring rapidly to a boil. Meanwhile, start heating up your boiling water bath in a separate pot. Stir constantly while bringing the mixture almost to the gelling point.
4) Transfer to clean, sterilized jars and screw on two-piece lids. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes.
Only four nights of Hanukkah left! Eat those latkes while you can, folks. My latkes tend to be somewhat improvised, so, rather than provide you with a real “recipe,” I’m sending you over to Food in Jars, where Marisa has put up a terrific step-by-step approach to latke goodness. (For the record, though, I do not endorse lard in latkes. It may be delicious, but it’s still just wrong.)
My best latke tips:
1. Really wring out those potatoes. You’ll ruin a kitchen towel, but you’ll be much happier with the results.
2. Add a tablespoon or so of cottage cheese. Just trust me on this one.
3. Make sure your oil is really, really hot. Few among us have a deep frying thermometer these days, so I’ll characterize it like the Spanish would: it needs to be hot enough to brown a breadcrumb in 30 seconds.
4. Scoop out the latkes in a 1/3 c. measuring cup. Really pack it in there, the better to keep it together in the frying pan.
I’ve never met a latke that I didn’t like, but I’m especially partial to cheese latkes, potato and sweet potato latkes, and regular potato latkes with a handful of shredded carrots thrown in. Yours?
This is a fairly basic salt cod stew from Simon and Inés Ortega’s wonderful 1080 Recipes. If you haven’t seen this book and are curious about what Spaniards eat at home (as opposed to in tapas bars), you’ve got to check it out. Part of what I love about it is that the translation to English is pretty much limited to language and measurements—I can think of few things less likely to appear in an American cookbook than “Lambs’ feet fritters” or “Pickled Partridges.” Other recipes, though, are eminently doable and made for improvisation. I was very, very happy with this recipe. The stew turned out sort of like a Spanish bouillabaisse, or maybe a thin Manhattan chowder, and the cooked salt cod ends up with a texture not unlike lobster.
1–3 pounds beef bones (the more you use, the richer the stock)
