Thursday, October 13, 2011
Warts and all
Interesting result with the 72nd batch of bread. All that was different was the use of own brand olive oil from Sainsbury's, a short first rise and a long second rise. Four of the five warts visible in the illustration. All paper thin and all survived cooking - they had formed during the second rise - but the most impressive was damaged on exit from its tin. Bread tasted fine with a touch of the crumpet about it. This may have been due to cooling in a warm and steamy kitchen.This last being down to next door's apples of which we took a consignment this morning, half a barrow full to be more precise. Mostly by hand but I did have a go with the litter picker. This gave a useful extra three feet of reach but required trickery to get an apple off the tree and into the hand without dropping it. Big ones, surprise surprise, much harder than medium sized ones. Small ones generally too well attached to the tree.
Having got the apples I was able to apply successfully for the lifting of the restraining order on blackberry harvesting and went out for a last swing down Horton Lane this afternoon, managing about a pound and a half in an hour. Would have done rather better last week and I think we are really at the end now, after a season of record breaking length.
The blackberries, 6 or 7 pounds of apples (after peeling and coring), 3 kilos of sugar and a couple of pints or so of water have now been boiled down into jam (the colour and appearance of full strength textured Ribena) and poured into 7 jam jars, 2 coffee jars, 1 jug (Berylware from Woods) and 1 dessert bowl. We even had a supply of the waxed paper discs used for topping out in the better class of kitchen.
The only real innovation was to cook the peel in a little water, liquidise it and add it to the boiling jam. The theory being that cooking apples are not that flavourful and what little flavour there is resides in the peel. On the other hand one does not want lumps of peel in the finished product.
Not sure if this was the result of the added peel, but there was very little scum. No need to remove what there was.
Now we have the long wait until morning to see it the stuff sets. I did tests on a plate but I have not made enough jam recently for that to be reliable.
# posted by Jim @ 11:17 AM 
