Doris and Jilly Cook » Sweets

Blueberry Pucker Winner

dorisandjilly — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:55:36 +0000

…and the Blueberry Pucker Conserve goes to Mimi! (No. 11 on the random number generator.) I hope you enjoy your jar of tart summer sunshine.

Tangerine Marmalade

dorisandjilly — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:34:18 +0000

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. The serving suggestions are endless, too: bake in on a ham, put it on bruschetta, or, if you’re feeling fancy, serve it in mugs with clotted cream for afternoon tea.

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.

Brandied Pears

dorisandjilly — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:55:44 +0000

Like regular canned pears, only drunk.

Brandied Pears

5 pounds ripe, yet firm, pears
Sugar syrup, at your preferred level of sweetness (I like 1 sugar: 2 water)
Several cups brandy

1) Put on a pot for a boiling water bath and sterilize your jars. I used 2 quarts and 2 pints. Life will be easier if you use wide-mouth jars. Heat up appropriate lids to match.

2) Heat up (or make) your simple syrup.

3) Peel and core your pears. Stuff them as tightly as possible into the jars, cut-side down. Pour 1 c. brandy into each of the quart jars and 1/2 c. brandy into each of the pint jars. Top them off with syrup. Run a spatula or knife around the edges to remove air bubbles, then add more syrup if necessary.

4) Screw on the lids and transfer the jars to the hot water bath. Process pints 20 minutes and quarts 25 minutes.

Let these sit for at least a month before opening to allow the flavors to pervade the fruit. Eat them on their own or over ice cream, and don’t forget the best part: pear brandy. You could boil it down to make a sauce, if you wanted, or just serve it in little tiny portions as a digestif.

Peach Sorbet

dorisandjilly — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:55:56 +0000

A spectacularly easy peach sorbet, made from homemade canned peaches. Note that this will only work if you canned your peaches in syrup—if you canned them in water, you’ll need to add at least a cup of sugar.

Peach Sorbet from Homemade Canned Peaches

2 pints or 1 quart canned peaches in syrup
1 T rum, brandy, or vodka

1) Puree everything (including all the peach syrup) in a blender.

2) Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker and process according to the manufacturer’s directions.

Seriously. That’s it.

Pickled Plums

dorisandjilly — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:55:47 +0000

It never would have occurred to me to pickle plums, but my friend Christina convinced me that pickled fruit was both delicious and indispensable. Hence, pickled plums. I made a couple of jars about a month ago and have been waiting until now so that I could taste them before sharing the recipe with all of you. I must confess: I’m underwhelmed. If you really like pickled fruit, you’ll like this—but they don’t necessarily taste like plums. Instead, they taste like vinegar, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. If this appeals to you, go for it! And if not, do something else with your plums, because this won’t make you happy.

Pickled Plums

(adapted from Linda Ziedrich’s Joy of Pickling)

3 pounds Italian plums
2 3/4 c. cider vinegar
2 c. sugar
2 small cinnamon sticks
2 dried chile peppers
4 whole cloves
12 allspice berries

1) Make a syrup from the vinegar and sugar over a medium flame. Prick the plums with a fork or needle to keep them from bursting. Add the plums to the syrup and cook them until they’re heated through.

2) Meanwhile, bring a water bath to a boil and sterilize 2 pint jars; heat up two lids.

3) Take the jars out of the hot water and add the cinnamon stick, 1 pepper, 2 cloves, and 6 allspice berries to each jar. Add the plums. Cover them with syrup, leaving 1/2″ head space.

4) Now, you have a choice. Ziedrich says you can just add the hot lids, screw on the lids, and hope for the best. This makes me nervous, so I gave my jars a quick (~5 minutes) dip in a boiling water bath to ensure a good seal. If you have a few extra plums, just stick them in the refrigerator and forget about them for at least a month.

So, dear readers, I’m curious. Have you tried pickling fruit before? What am I missing?

Raspberry Plum Sorbet

dorisandjilly — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:49:15 +0000

My husband—a native New Englander—insists that the time to eat ice cream is winter, not summer. So, now that there’s a chill in the air, he’s craving frozen treats. Since this is an excuse to pull out yet another gadget from the pantry, I am happy to oblige.

Sorbets are basically a frozen purée of fruit in simple syrup, with optional flavors added. The catch is that, since they’re fat free, they tend to freeze into a solid mass of fruit ice. Commerical sorbets contain stabilizers and emulsifiers to solve this problem, but the home cook has a simpler solution: booze. Adding just a single tablespoon of alcohol to a quart of sorbet before you freeze it will keep the texture scoopable by lowering the freezing point. If alcohol is a problem for you, I encourage you to experiment with adding egg whites instead—I’ve never tried it myself, but I’ve seen the technique described in Italian cookbooks.

This recipe is basically the one in David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop, only re-written in a way that makes sense to me. It’s a great book for flavors, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me, I find his directions confusing (too much information, I think). Here’s a streamlined version:

Raspberry Plum Sorbet

1 pound plums
1 c. water
2/3 c. sugar (more or less, to taste)
3/4 c. raspberries (fresh or frozen; if frozen in sugar, add less sugar)
1 T agreeable alcohol (he recommends 1 t. kirsch; I used rum. Something flavorless, like vodka, will always work.)

1) Pit the plums, cut them in large pieces, and cook them in the water until tender. Add the sugar and raspberries; stir to dissolve the sugar.

2) Purée, then strain if the raspberry seeds or plum skims bother you.

3) Chill thoroughly, then freeze it in your ice cream maker.

Canned Pears with Star Anise

dorisandjilly — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:55:31 +0000

Normally, I am a fan of the hot-pack approach to canning fruit, as it helps you fit more fruit into each jar. A recipe in last month’s New York Times, however, convinced me that it’s silly to poach pears separately, since a water-bath canning process will effectively poach the pears for you. I found their recipe, with its thyme, vinegar, and peppercorns, a bit fussy and decided to take a more straightforward approach: simple syrup + star anise. Since I still had some Seckel pears left over from my last trip to Mood’s, I left them whole. It really is the kind of thing that invites endless variation: if you like peppercorns and thyme with your pears, then by all means, you should try it. I suspect ginger would be particularly nice.

Canned Pears with Star Anise

5 pounds pears
4 cups syrup, at your preferred level of sweetness (I like 1:2 sugar: water)
Juice of one lemon
4 star anise

1) Start a boiling water bath large enough to cover 2 quart jars or 4 pint jars. Dissolve the sugar in water and bring the syrup to a boil. Add the lemon juice. While you’re waiting, peel your pears. If they’re small, leave them whole; if they’re large, cut them in half and remove the core. Cut out any bad spots. Don’t forget to warm up your lids.

2) Fit as many pears as possible into each jar, along with 1 star anise per pint jar or 2 per quart jar. Of course, you may need more jars. Cover the pears with syrup, run a knife or spatula along the inside of the jar to remove any air bubbles, and add more syrup if necessary.

3) Process quarts for 25 minutes or pints for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. Remember to remove the bands and wipe down the jars, as they may be sticky.

Blackberry Sauce

dorisandjilly — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:38:12 +0000

Faced with an avalanche of blackberries? Want a freezer or shelf full of gorgeous, garnet colored sauce? Then this might be just the project for you. I’m loathe to call it a “recipe”—it’s something Jilly whipped up when I kept bringing in box after box of giant blackberries from our mother’s patch on my recent visit to the farm, and we didn’t really keep a close track on what we were doing. With that caveat, here are our not-so-detailed instructions.

Blackberry Sauce

1) Clean a lot of blackberries. Say, 2 or 3 quarts.

2) Put them in a big pot with a lot of sugar. How much? That depends on your blackberries. My guess is that Jilly used about 4 cups in this batch.

3) Bring the whole thing to a boil. Then boil the crap out of it until you like the texture. This can take anywhere between 1 and 3 hours, depending on your patience, the quantity of blackberries, and how thick you want your sauce.

4) Remove the seeds by pouring it through a strainer. This will be a more pleasant experience if you have an old-fashioned jelly-style strainer, like this:

Depending on how many blackberries you started with, you may need to work in batches. Swirl it around every once and awhile.

5) Pick your preservation method. This would freeze well, but you can also can it. Since it’s full of berries and sugar, 10 minutes in a boiling water bath should do it. As always, you can get excellent canning pointers from the folks at the National Center for Home Food Preservation or our friends over at the Canvolution.

Our apologies on the quantities! Please do let us know if you figure it out. It’s delicious over ice cream, yogurt, brownies, bread pudding, or just about anything.

Peach, Cherry, and Apple Compote

dorisgoat — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:55:51 +0000

My absolutely favorite way to eat fruit is over yogurt, so, when faced with the dwindling remains of the massive pile of fruit, I decided to combine the leftovers into a sort of “best of” fruit stew. You can preserve pretty much any kind of fruit this way: just pick some things that go together, throw them in a pot with some sugar, and cook them until they look like a stew. Then can them in a water bath or freeze. Dried fruit and/or nuts makes a particularly nice addition since it gives some texture.

The lighting doesn’t quite do these jars justice: they’re a really lovely combination of gold (from the peaches) and deep red (from the cherries). I’m thinking they’ll make beautiful and tasty yogurt parfaits.

Peach, Cherry, and Apple Compote

2 lbs peaches
1 lb cherries
Approx 1 c dried apples, cut into small pieces
2 c sugar

1) Peel the peaches by dipping them briefly in boiling water. Slip off the skins and cut them into slices or large chunks. Pit the cherries.

2) Throw everything in a pot and bring to a boil. You don’t want to cook it too long—just long enough that only some of the fruit breaks down and you get a nice, fruity syrup. This took about 20 minutes.

3) Meanwhile, if you plan to can the compote, sterilize some jars (mine made 4 pints) and heat up some lids. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. You can freeze, if you prefer.

Cherries in Syrup

dorisgoat — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:55:17 +0000

Sorry for the silence, folks. I am forcing myself to step slowly away from the piano to tell you more about what we did with all that fruit. We’ll get back in the swing of thing with an easy one: cherries in syrup.

Do you like brandied cherries? Or maybe candied cherries? Then this one may be for you. The basic idea is that you put your cherries in sterilized jars with something sweet, like simple syrup or a liqueur, then tuck them in the back of your refrigerator for several months. Then serve them in their stunning summer glory over ice cream or custard or chocolate mousse in the deep of winter. If you’d like, you can add something that will give it flavor, like a vanilla bean, star anise, or cardamon. Whether you pit them or not is really up to you. Pitting them makes them easier to eat, but the pits add some flavor. Your call.

Cherries in Syrup

Some quantity of cherries, pitted if desired
Sweet liquid to cover, such as simple syrup or brandy
Sterilized jars
Spices for flavoring, if desired

1) If you’re using a simple syrup, simply dissolve sugar in water over low heat in a 1:1 ratio. Let it cool.

2) Put your cherries in the jars and cover with a sweet liquid. Run a knife around the inside of the jar to remove air bubbles if needed. Add any spices (I like star anise) and more liquid, if needed. Refrigerate and forget about them for at least two months. Then eat at will.

Bonus: Once you’ve finished all the cherries you’ll be left with a cherry-infused syrup. It’s DYI kirsch!