Saints preserve us

It’s a joke among knitters that making a project from one’s stash always requires one to go out and buy more yarn. I often feel that way about cooking with the produce that comes to me: using up four baskets of strawberries requires a cup of sugar, two cups of flour and and egg, and making use of a bunch of kale and dandelion greens called for a pound of ricotta cheese, a pound of mozzarella and a large can of tomatoes.

In this case, preserving a box of loquats used up all of my sugar. It also brought out another obscure piece of Italian hand-cranked kitchen equipment that I use even less often (if that’s possible) than my pasta machine. It’s a gadget for separating the juicy flesh of tomatoes from their skins and seeds, and I wasn’t even sure whether I had given it away years ago. But, no, there it was, behind the easter-egg shaped cake pan and the foundue pot.

Loquats have rather tough skin and a tough membrane

around their big, glossy seeds.

I could have cooked the pitted fruit and then forced the cooked puree through a sieve. However, while I have an Italian tomato de-skinner-and-seeder, I don’t have a sieve suitable for forcing pulp through. I guess that would probably be a chinois. So I loaded up the hopper with loquats

and cranked away. The juice and fine pulp flowed into a bowl.

And the skins and membranes spooged out the other side.

The whole thing made a godawful mess, if the truth be told, as well as putting a bruise on my forearm where I was pressing down on the contraption so that it didn’t jump off the counter. What I got out of it was so juicy that I would have been better served by boiling the pitted fruit in water almost to cover, then straining it in cheesecloth to extract an undoubtedly more pectin-rich juice suitable for making jelly.

But I didn’t do that. So this morning, I added the frozen apple juice I had extracted in just the way described above when I made my huge apple pie. And I made an apple-loquat jelly, although it’s not clear, like a blue-ribbon winning jelly would be.

When I make jams and jellies, I almost always use the recipe that comes in the pectin box (or at the Kraft website, since they own Sure-Gel and MCP pectins now, and since the pectin box insert no longer contain the recipes for things like mayhaws.) As I said the other day, I like the fresher taste that I think gets, well, preserved, when I don’t cook the fruit for close to an hour. But I do make apricot jam by cooking it down until it’s very thick. That’s kind of a family tradition now. It also takes a huge amount of apricots, so it happens once during the summer, these days after we pick the Guadalupe historic orchard.

I’m listening as I type to the pings of the jar lids’ sealing. Then I’ll check whether this concoction actually jelled. Because I have to admit that even the Kraft website doesn’t have a recipe for the mixture that I came up with, and I don’t know whether I used enough sugar. I’ll let you know.