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

Two good rhubarb recipes

I have never been a fan of rhubarb. But it’s abundant at this time of year, and there’s little else to experiment with pudding-wise. So, for the past few weeks I’ve been trying to find a recipe I like.

I started by making rhubarb compotes. However, I only enjoyed eating them when I used equal quantities of sugar and rhubarb. I took the hint and moved on to jams. 

Rhubarb and ginger jam  

Rhubarb and ginger jam

Rhubarb is low in pectin, so you need to either use jam sugar (which has added pectin) or add another fruit that’s high in pectin (oranges, lemons or apples). Otherwise the jam won’t set.

Using jam sugar cuts the cooking time down to 10 minutes or less.

This BBC recipe was easy and produced a delicious vibrant jam; plum red and punchy.

Rhubarb and orange marmalade

This Lakeland recipe uses oranges to provide the pectin. You take near equal quantities of rhubarb, oranges and sugar, and cook them for 45 minutes.

This produced a very different jam, much more subtle than the first, with a delicate sweetness from the oranges and a faint tang of rhubarb.

Rhubarb and orange ice cream

Rhubarb pudding

The first jam was delicious swirled through yoghurt. 

The second made a lovely marmalade ice cream using the recipe from Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook (worth tracking down, you don’t even have to churn the mixture).

A slab of homemade quince cheese





 

This week, I made some quince cheese. I had some very ugly quinces - covered in black spots, some deformed, some not quite ripe.  However, looks are not important for jam-making; it’s what’s inside that counts.

I decided to try this recipe from epicurious, mainly because it requires only 25 minutes stirring the pot (with some recipes, it’s over an hour). I reduced the amount of sugar (to taste), and added a teaspoon of lemon juice.



It set after only 20 minutes of stirring, and it tasted superb – heady and fragrant, like a warm Mediterranean breeze. Because I reduced the sugar, it may not keep so well, but I don’t think it’ll take us long to polish it off.

These are the quinces I didn't use, but you get the idea. Not pretty.

Apparently, quince has been cultivated for up to 3000 years, and quince cheese was one of the earliest jams. It’s the original and still one of the best in my book.