'Tis the Season...for Pick-Your-Own

One of the most wonderful things about summer is that you can get great deals on berries and fruits by picking them yourself at "Pick-Your-Own" farms.  Plus, it's a fantastic family outing at the same time.

Here in New England, we've already had a great strawberry season (good thing after last year's soggy mess) and we're moving quickly into blueberry, raspberry, and blackberry season.  I didn't personally get out to get strawberries but I'm not going to miss the blueberries--however hot it usually is when they're ready to pick.

Many folks like to go out and pick berries but don't know what to do with the abundance they bring home.  Strawberries, in particular, go from great to mush very quickly.  Here are a few ideas for storing and serving.

• Make Refrigerator Jam - Most people assume that making jam is difficult and that it requires a lot of fancy equipment.  The truth is that if you make a small batch and use very clean containers, you can keep it in the fridge for a few months in an ordinary plastic leftovers container.  No canning or special equipment involved!
• Freeze Them - If you have the freezer space, most berries freeze pretty well to be used later in the year in baked goods or for a summer-tasting treat.  Freeze blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries in a single layer on a large baking sheet (uncovered).  As soon as they're hard like marbles, transfer them to a zip-top bag and put into the back of the freezer far from the door so they don't accumulate  moisture and freezer burn.  Strawberries need to be washed, thoroughly dried, hulled, and cut into quarters.  Place the quarters into quart-sized zip-top bags and freeze.  The defrosted result will be a little mushy, but it's perfect as a cheesecake topping, waffle/pancake topping, or for mid-winter strawberry shortcake.
• Make and Freeze Pie Filling - This is a neat trick.  Prepare your favorite berry pie filling.  Instead of filling a pie, line a pie plate with plastic wrap and spray lightly with nonstick spray.  Pour cooled filling into the pie plate.  Freeze until solid and, using the plastic wrap as a sling, remove the frozen "pie" from the plate.  Wrap in several layers of plastic and foil and keep frozen.  When you want to use it, prepare your pastry crust, drop-in the frozen berry slab, and add the top crust.  Bake as usual.
• Make Juice - If you happen to have a juicer or a food mill or even a wire mesh strainer, you can make juice.  Puree the berries in a food processor and add a little hot water to loosen it up.  Add to a sauce pan and bring mixture up to a boil.  Once it reaches a boil, turn off the heat and let it cool.  Strain through a food mill or strainer and pour into containers to freeze.  In the winter, you can add this juice to some freshly brewed iced tea, lemonade, or add sugar and drink it straight-up.
• Dry Them -  If you happen to have a food dehydrator, dried berries can be awesome additions to salads and they can be re-hydrated with a little warm water and added to muffins and pancakes and other treats.  You can even make "fruit leather," a homemade equivalent to fruit roll-ups.  Scour the Internet for recipes.

As I come up with more ideas, I'll be sure to share them here.

Everything But the Oink

There's an old saying about pigs and how you can use, "Everything but the oink," (or everything but the squeal). The saying refers to the idea of taking advantage of 100% of the food we raise, leaving as little waste as possible. Whether it's a pig, a cow, a chicken, or farm-fresh vegetables, the more of the item we use and the less we throw away, the better we're doing for ourselves and the environment. The Native Americans knew this better than just about anyone.

Yesterday, I tackled 20+ pounds of apples that I picked last week and I can truly say that I feel fantastic about having sucked as much out of those apples as I possibly could. It took a few old-school cooking techniques (like using a "ricer") and it was a challenge, but what a great feeling now that I'm done. Here's what I made:

• Spiced Apple Rings (6 jars, 16oz each)
• Canned Apple Pie Filling (10 jars, 16oz each)
• About a quart plus of rosy-pink all-natural unsweetened applesauce
  
• One "mile high" deep-dish apple pie
• Three mini apple pies
• Eight jars of apple jelly (made earlier in the week)
• Three jars of brown sugar sweetened applesauce
  

The applesauce was made by boiling the skins, cores, and other discarded pieces of apples down untill they were soft and then mashing them through an old-fashioned ricer. Because the red skins of the apples contributed their red color, the sauce has a beautiful pink hue.


In the end, I was left with a small pile of actual skin, seeds, etc. that weighed just 2 pounds 9 ounces. That's 2% or less of the original apples, which I think is pretty fantastic.

Since I don't have a compost pile, the final remains were sent down the garbage disposal in hopes that they will once again join the environment and help things to grow, depending on how my city processes waste.

In a Jam...

Any of you who know me personally know that I've been on a "canning" kick since oh, about Christmas. Yeah, yeah. I know that doesn't make much sense because you can't really get fresh, local produce right now, but it's good practice and June is coming up soon which means STRAWBERRIES! Yum!

Anyway, I happened upon a deal for California strawberries a few days ago ($1 per one-pound box) and I thought I'd try my hand at making jam. My grandmother used to make jam and I've done some tinkering with it in the past. I've always appreciated it like one would a work of art and, let's face it, it seems very complicated and time consuming. When I actually started reading about it, I discovered that that was not so. It turns out you can make yourself a pretty snazzy home-made jam or jelly without special equipment, without mason jars, and without delving into canning. In fact, you can even make jam and jelly in the microwave!

First, A Jam Primer (aka "Getting in a Jam")
Preserved fruits fall into three major categories: Jam, Jelly, and Preserves. Depending on your information source, the descriptions vary quite a bit and overlap more than you'd think, so I'm going to take a little literary license, expand the list, and make-up my own definitions.

• Jelly - Jelly is a clear, firm fruit spread made by mixing fruit juice with lots of sugar and commercially produced pectin (a cousin of gelatin), boiling it a bit, then pouring it into jars to set-up. It's a bit of a pain to make from scratch because you can't press the fruit during the juicing process or you'll have cloudy jelly. Jellies are usually made from fruits that naturally produce a clear juice like grapes and apples.
  
• Old-Fashioned Jams - Traditionally, jam is made by boiling-down chopped fruit with sugar only. It's a bit like making candy where you're slowly evaporating and concentrating the mixture till it turns thick, dark, and syrupy. Also, sugar reacts with the natural pectin in the fruit to help it jell or set-up once the jam cools. The result is a very sweet, sometimes caramelized fruit that's soft, spreadable, quite sweet, but really tastes like concentrated fruit. Typically, berries are used to make jams because they have a lot of natural fruit pectin (under the skins) and because it's okay if you have pulp (and seeds in the case of strawberries) in the product. The downside of old-fashioned jams is that you typically end-up with about 1/3 or less of the volume you started with, so it takes a lot of very expensive berries to yield an 8-oz jar of jam.
  
• Quick Jams - Quick jams are somewhere between old-fashioned jams and jellies. With quick jams, you boil the fruit and sugar only briefly with the addition of commercial pectin. The pectin helps it set-up and you still get chunks of fruit in the spread. It has less of a caramelized flavor and the yield is higher since you don't have to boil it as long.
• Preserves - I've seen multiple definitions for preserves. Some lean towards old-fashioned jams, others lean towards quick jams. To make matters worse, commercial producers often call jam preserves and the other way around, so I'll leave the jury out on this.
• Seedless Jams - This is a marketing name someone thought-up because kids don't like (and have difficulty digesting) the seeds in strawberry jam. As best as I can tell, it's more like a strawberry jelly than a jam, as pectin needs to be added to help it set when so much of the pulp and skin is removed.

Now that we've settled the bickering over terminology of grandmothers and farmhouse wives everywhere, let's talk about how this can apply to you, an everyday cook with little time on your hands. There are three things we can do to cheat the system:

1. Refrigerate It - One thing Grandma knew was the concept of "Refrigerator Jam". What this means is that you don't have to "can" jam. You can simply pour it into a very clean container of your choice (a mason jar, a plastic container) and stick it in the fridge. Properly refrigerated, the sugar will help keep bacteria out and your jam will last for months (well, if you don't eat it all in one sitting). There are also recipes for freezer jam.
   
2. Use the Microwave - It turns out there are recipes out there for microwave jams, microwave jelly, and even microwave applesauce. Note: Please don't use the "just pour it into a jar and let it seal on its own" or "pour it in a jar and cover it with paraffin wax" canning methods found in the jelly recipe I linked to. Those processes are no longer considered safe by the USDA. If you really want to preserve it, use a boiling water bath canner and follow a tested recipe.
   
3. Buy Juice - Commercial pectin is pretty powerful stuff--so powerful, in fact, that you can use it to make jam out of commercially produced juice. To make it worthwhile, make sure you're buying 100% juice (not "juice drink") and maybe shop in the organic aisle since organic juices tend to have little or no added sugar and no extra "junk" like corn syrup.

Why go through all that trouble?
One look at the back of any jar of commercially produced spreads (even the brand names you know and love) will answer that question. That PB&J sandwich is mostly corn syrup and "filler" fruits that are neutral tasting and cheaper than the fruit that's supposed to be in the jar. Pardon me, but my grape jelly shouldn't be 60% pear or apple juice.

Another reason is that the cost is actually justifiable in most cases. A friend of mine happened across this excellent blog post about whether home-produced jams are cost effective, but I'll give you my own analysis on top of that. My wife puts a spoonful of "no sugar added" blueberry preserves into her plain-flavored oatmeal every day (less calories, more flavor). We were buying little 6oz jars from Stonewall Kitchen at $6.99 per jar. It turns out that, even in the off-season, I can buy two bags of frozen blueberries from Trader Joe's at $2.79 each and produce 20oz or so of jam. That's $1.65 per ounce versus 28 cents an ounce.

And last, but not least, taste is the final reason. I've never liked strawberry jam because it always tasted like "artificial" strawberries to me. After mixing-up my batch of homemade jam, I found that I love the stuff (especially slathered on a bagel OVER cream cheese). It's just tangy enough so you know there's real fruit in it but candy-sweet, the way a good jam or jelly should be. And, it makes the best PB&J sandwiches you'll ever put in your mouth. :-)