A slice of gooseberry cheese

I made some gooseberry fruit cheese last week. It’s made by cooking gooseberry puree and sugar together slowly for an hour or so. The finished “cheese” is solid, sunset orange and sliceable.

There is a history of making fruit cheese in the UK, but it’s not popular at the moment. I followed this recipe on Celtnet, but reduced the sugar to 40g for every 100ml of gooseberry puree to retain some of the fruit’s sourness.

Once the preserve was made, the next question was what to eat with it. Fruit cheeses are normally eaten with actual cheese. After a few experiments, we found that ours went particularly well with cheddar and other hard cheeses.

I also thought it complemented grilled mackerel, however other members of the household begged to differ muttering something about how eating fish with jam was a very strange idea.

Gooseberries - topped, tailed and ready to be cooked