Adventures in farm food
Sep. 30th, 2020 21:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillIt turns out that you can, indeed, make things with straight Aronia berries...
We've been mixing them with apples and pears to temper the flavor, making fruit butter and (attempted) fruit leather. They lose the "choke" when fully cooked, and they have a rich, very intense, dark flavor of their own. So I thought, what happens if I treat them like cranberries?
I stewed two cups of fruit in one cup water and a half-cup sugar. After about 90 minutes, they were still firm. Stewed them for a few hours longer. Added water just as they started to catch. Mashed them a little and reheated them, then put them into a casserole and dropped cobbler dough (just a basic biscuit) on them. Baked it for about an hour. Served it up with vanilla ice cream.
The flavor reminds me of a cross between very rich black sweet cherries and blueberries. It's intense enough to make me sweat a little -- it absolutely needs the cobbler dough and the vanilla ice cream, or whipped cream, to cut it. My only quibble is that there are still some firm, slightly woody bits in there, probably the seed casings. I might want to run this through a food mill as a matter of course.
At least they come with enough acidity and a strong dark edge (not quite bitterness) to keep them from being cloyingly sweet. I had the wit to cut the sugar in half from the basic simple syrup we use with cranberries, since Aronia isn't as tart. It was a good change.
It might be interesting made into ice cream. I'd probably want to stew them into a syrup and use that to flavor it, rather than whole berries.
In other news, we had one batch of applesauce start to ferment because something came up and it got left on the counter on a warm afternoon... It got past the "that has a kick" stage and into the "this is starting to taste like yeast" stage. I threw it into a quart jar and put it in the fridge, where it proceeded to pressurize enough to leak sticky syrup all over one shelf. Last night I grabbed a quarter cup of it, added a cup of flour and a tablespoon of brown sugar, a little salt, a tablespoon of butter, and a flax egg (flax meal plus boiling water), plus enough milk to make a batter, and left it in a cold place overnight. It made some really amazing yeast pancakes this morning. I still have a bunch of starter left...
It has me wondering what it would be like to keep a yeast starter made from apples rather than flour. It seems like it would take a lot of apples, but when I think about the seven five-gallon buckets of William's Pride that we donated to the relief efforts, plus the two or three buckets we still have, plus the applesauce we've made, and add that to the few buckets worth that dropped early and rotted before I could go out and get them... and that was ONE tree... I think it would become more a matter of "how much freezer space would it take to feed a starter for a year?" After all, unlike sourdough pets, giving it a big feed to bulk up into dough doesn't use the same stuff the starter lives on -- that's shelf-stable flour, not applesauce. And I recall that a friend of mine has kept a "fruit salad" alive and well in the back of his fridge (and descendants in a few friends' fridges) for something like twenty-five years now, with judicious feeding. Rum pots are a thing. Why not an apple starter?
It could be interesting to make bread with it, if nothing else. Sweet breads and muffins would be good. Waffles, pancakes, crepes... anything that doesn't mind a little sweetness with the yeast. I might experiment with some bargain-bin apples over the winter. Of course, it might be wise to save a little of this existing starter, to start off with the right mix of yeasts. I just need to grab a bit of applesauce to feed it from time to time. The Gravensteins are still hard as rocks, and may stay that way this year, but they're ripe enough to cook, and if they're hard they may keep a long time...
And if all else fails, we'll have another avalanche of William's Pride next summer. Odds are good I can coax the yeasts to fire up again.
We've been mixing them with apples and pears to temper the flavor, making fruit butter and (attempted) fruit leather. They lose the "choke" when fully cooked, and they have a rich, very intense, dark flavor of their own. So I thought, what happens if I treat them like cranberries?
I stewed two cups of fruit in one cup water and a half-cup sugar. After about 90 minutes, they were still firm. Stewed them for a few hours longer. Added water just as they started to catch. Mashed them a little and reheated them, then put them into a casserole and dropped cobbler dough (just a basic biscuit) on them. Baked it for about an hour. Served it up with vanilla ice cream.
The flavor reminds me of a cross between very rich black sweet cherries and blueberries. It's intense enough to make me sweat a little -- it absolutely needs the cobbler dough and the vanilla ice cream, or whipped cream, to cut it. My only quibble is that there are still some firm, slightly woody bits in there, probably the seed casings. I might want to run this through a food mill as a matter of course.
At least they come with enough acidity and a strong dark edge (not quite bitterness) to keep them from being cloyingly sweet. I had the wit to cut the sugar in half from the basic simple syrup we use with cranberries, since Aronia isn't as tart. It was a good change.
It might be interesting made into ice cream. I'd probably want to stew them into a syrup and use that to flavor it, rather than whole berries.
In other news, we had one batch of applesauce start to ferment because something came up and it got left on the counter on a warm afternoon... It got past the "that has a kick" stage and into the "this is starting to taste like yeast" stage. I threw it into a quart jar and put it in the fridge, where it proceeded to pressurize enough to leak sticky syrup all over one shelf. Last night I grabbed a quarter cup of it, added a cup of flour and a tablespoon of brown sugar, a little salt, a tablespoon of butter, and a flax egg (flax meal plus boiling water), plus enough milk to make a batter, and left it in a cold place overnight. It made some really amazing yeast pancakes this morning. I still have a bunch of starter left...
It has me wondering what it would be like to keep a yeast starter made from apples rather than flour. It seems like it would take a lot of apples, but when I think about the seven five-gallon buckets of William's Pride that we donated to the relief efforts, plus the two or three buckets we still have, plus the applesauce we've made, and add that to the few buckets worth that dropped early and rotted before I could go out and get them... and that was ONE tree... I think it would become more a matter of "how much freezer space would it take to feed a starter for a year?" After all, unlike sourdough pets, giving it a big feed to bulk up into dough doesn't use the same stuff the starter lives on -- that's shelf-stable flour, not applesauce. And I recall that a friend of mine has kept a "fruit salad" alive and well in the back of his fridge (and descendants in a few friends' fridges) for something like twenty-five years now, with judicious feeding. Rum pots are a thing. Why not an apple starter?
It could be interesting to make bread with it, if nothing else. Sweet breads and muffins would be good. Waffles, pancakes, crepes... anything that doesn't mind a little sweetness with the yeast. I might experiment with some bargain-bin apples over the winter. Of course, it might be wise to save a little of this existing starter, to start off with the right mix of yeasts. I just need to grab a bit of applesauce to feed it from time to time. The Gravensteins are still hard as rocks, and may stay that way this year, but they're ripe enough to cook, and if they're hard they may keep a long time...
And if all else fails, we'll have another avalanche of William's Pride next summer. Odds are good I can coax the yeasts to fire up again.