Tag: blackberries

Foraging to make Fruit Leather – Part 2

So, we returned from our foraging expedition with two bags of berries. There were still huge amounts left on the bushes but we had to stop. I needed to see if the fruit leather experiment would work, or, at least, work for me. If it does then I am going back to get more.

Once back in the kitchen I picked through the berries and removed any leaves and stray bits that had fallen into our bags and put them straight into a large, heavy bottomed pan on a gentle heat to start cooking down.

The theory behind making fruit leather is that you have to cook the fruit and puree it, adding just honey or sugar to sweeten it (if necessary) and lemon juice. What you end up with is the very essence of the fruit so it is important to keep everything simple. There’s no need to add too much sugar…I suppose, though, it is a matter of taste. Berries, especially wild berries, can be very sharp and do need something to sweeten them. Just don’t go masking the fruit with an overload of sugar.

A sprinkling of sugar helps the berries start to cook down – there’s  no need to add water as the juices soon come out. Just look at that glorious colour!

Once the fruit was cooked, I strained the fruit pulp to get the majority of the juice out

There was still a lot of juice in the pulp so I got my mouli food mill out and started milling the pulp. This will keep the seeds out and push through the pulp. Wild berries are very seedy so you must try and get the majority of them out. If you haven’t got a food mill then try pushing the pulp through a sieve.

You can see how many seeds there are as the pulp gets pushed through

And underneath the mill you can see the pure fruit pulp being squeezed out

Last year we had gone to a Pick Your Own Fruit farm and came home with punnets of strawberries. I had cooked some of them down and frozen, in bags, those we didn’t eat. This was an ideal time to use up the last of the bags of strawberries and add some extra fruit to our fruit leather. There would be seeds from the strawberries, I know, but at least I had removed the majority of the blackberry seeds.

I added the juice of a lemon

And some honey to taste

And pureed it all to a lovely smooth mix before letting it simmer, bubbling gently for 5 minutes.

I lined a couple of baking trays with clingfilm

And poured in a thin layer of the fruit puree. It spreads out over the cling film. You don’t need a really thick layer – maybe 3mm or thereabouts? Put in a bit at a time and tip the tin back and forth to get an even layer.

My great plan to free up freezer space by making preserved fruit that didn’t need freezing wasn’t quite working out because I had puree left over.  Into pots it went and into the freezer. Some was poured over yoghurt that evening to have a a dessert after supper.

And then this is when I started to wonder how I was going to do the next bit….

Everything I had read suggested that the trays were then put into the oven on 50 degrees c (120 degrees F) and left for 6 hours. And yes, it was OK to use clingfilm and put it in the oven. That temperature is so low it won’t melt the clingfilm. What you are really doing, of course, is just drying it out, rather than cooking it. When this is manufactured on a large scale, dehydrators are used but an oven on the lowest temperature possible for a long time does the job just as well.

Thing is, it was 9pm and I was tired… did I start it off now and then set my alarm for 3am? Or did I try and stay awake till midnight and then turn the oven off when I got up for work?  What would happen if I left it in for longer?

I decided, in the end, to start it off before I went to bed and get up at three…. but then, of course, I ended up waking up every hour or so and going to check.  I thought I might as well so at least we would all have some kind of idea about cooking it.

For the first few hours it was definitely liquid and I thought I must have gone wrong somewhere but eventually

as the sun came up,  it became thicker and sticky… and at last it looked set.

It was darker and when I touched it it felt tacky but not sticky

I could peel it away from the cling film! It had worked!

Maybe it could have stayed in a bit longer as there was some puree still liquid underneath…

But really? I think it worked! It pulled up as a sheet just as I’d read it would do

I had two sheets of fruit leather

It was easy to cut into strips

And held up to the light it was the most beautiful colour

All I had to do now was put the strips into an airtight box and we had our supplies of fruit leather.

The big question, of course, is was it worth it?

Was it worth diving through the bushes, getting scratched and prickled to collect the fruit? Was it worth the constant getting up to check the progress of the leather? Would I do it again?

Yes, yes and yes.

I know that next time I will be more relaxed about the timing  – 50 degrees C is so low that leaving it in there for longer won’t harm it and next time when there’s puree left over I will simply make another tray of it.

The taste was fantastic – it really was the fruitiest fruity taste I’d ever had. The texture was smooth and chewy, but not horribly so… it soon dissolves. We have eaten it as a sweet treat  and also cut it into slices and stirred it through yoghurt.

Guess what? We’re going out blackberrying again.

Foraging to make Fruit Leather – Part 1

The Bear was finally home from his travels and we were  not at work.  It was also not raining or blowing a gale. For everything to come together like that,  is actually a very rare occurrence in our lives so we decided to make the most of it and go for a stroll and see how the blackberries were doing in the hedgerows. Goodness knows why the Bear and I went out to get more fruit because our freezer (and the freezer of everyone associated with our family) is already packed with fruit already. I suppose it’s just that  I just can’t bear to see waste. The brambles are absolutely laden with fruit and even the birds can’t get through that much.

This year has been fantastic for fruit – my apples and figs were fruiting heavily on the trees on the balcony and my mother’s fruit garden has produced more pounds of goosecurrants, redcurrants, whitecurrants and gooseberries than we know what to do with.

We have had family and friends round to pick as much as they want and there are still pounds more to pick

It comes to something when even her young grandson is sent out to help get the redcurrants. He carefully showed me how best to get them off the stems using a fork to drag down the stalks, knocking the currants off as it goes and a bowl underneath to catch them.

The goosecurrants (two ancient bushes) are a cross between a blackcurrant and a gooseberry and they have been particularly prolific this year.

They make fantastic jam or jelly and my sister in law has made some spectacular jam that puts my mother’s to shame. Mind you, she is the one who did the Pheasant Breasting Masterclass  while my brother took the pictures,back in December, so you know from that that she has a real talent in the kitchen.

Even my mother’s  ancient apple tree that hasn’t borne fruit for the last 20 odd years has suddenly started producing. There are bags of cleaned fruit in the freezers just waiting to have something done with them. Enough jam has been made to go on toast and fill cakes until all of us are old and grey and we still have more bags than we can count. Cordials and ice creams are next on the list to make – all we are missing is the time to do them all.

But still, we thought, we might as well go and look at the blackberries. And besides, I had an idea for something. Something that wouldn’t take up any more freezer space. If we did get blackberries I would use them that evening.

We live on the top of a hill and to the side of where we are, is a lovely park. We can walk out along the private path and down into the park itself. It is a fantastic walk in every season of the year – in winter it really looks magical in the snow… in summer, people are out on the grass and now? Now the bushes are laden with fruit and people are walking round with bags.

The park is well maintained and the grass is mown and even the edges where the hedgerow plants are, are looked after. The gardeners  always leave the blackberry bushes to fruit.

Deep inside the bushes that line the edge of the park are old, abandoned apple trees that fruit heavily and the apples just fall to the ground.

Today though, we were there for blackberries. Plenty of people had been there before us so we were going to have to head deeper into the bushes.

We went further into the wild tangle of brambles – so wild they had entwined themselves around apple trees and the blackberries hung down alongside ripening apples.

Luckily I brought along a straightened out wire coat hanger (with the hook left, of course) so I could pull down the best of the blackberry branches.

We got lots of great big, fat and juicy blackberries with only minor damage to ourselves – a few scratches here and there and a minor tumble into the stinging nettles… but, as I assured the Bear as he lay there yelping in agony, it would all be worth it.

The thing about blackberries is that you have to use them the day you pick them. They must carry mould spores on them because if you leave them for a few hours, once picked, they will go mouldy.

There was a reason for me wanting to get more fruit, though. I wanted to try something I had read about over the past few years. When we first met, for our first Christmas, the Bear bought me “Preserved” by Johnny Acton and Nick Sandler – fabulous book that details all kinds of methods and recipes for preserving food. I’d read it and made plans to work through it but, as always, life got in the way and I never got round to it.

The thing I was most intrigued by was fruit leather – where quantities of fruit were pureed and then dried, in a thin layer, making a dried fruit sheet that lasts  without having to freeze it. It’s called leather because that is what it looks like – it is soft and chewy in reality.

So… something that could use up extra fruit and wouldn’t take up space in my freezer? That had to be worth a go, right?