Wild Blackberries

We have plenty of blackberries growing wild in patches all around our little farm.  We have places where there used to be thick gorse and now there is thick blackberry.

Last year, I asked a friend who grew up on a Berry farm, what the difference was between wild and commercial blackberries.  He said thorns.  The commercial varieties have been bred to be mostly thornless.  There was a disease called Dryberry introduced as an attempt to control wild blackberry.  It affects them sometimes and also affects the commercial varieties.  We saw a little bit of it in our wild berries last year, but not so much this year.

I went for a walk on Sunday to have a look at the blackberries.  I was quite surprised to see that there were some ripening.  I started to pick them, not entirely sure how much I’d find.  One berry from each bunch, just in one patch, gave me 240g of berries, which was more than I’d thought.

I decided to try making blackberry cordial and set out on Google to find a recipe.  The first 6 or 7 recipes all sounding truly yummy but contained vodka or brandy.  I wanted something I could give to Miss Seven.

I finally added the words “alcohol free” to my search terms.  I found one that was pretty straight forward.

Blackberry Cordial (alcohol free)

400g blackberries

1 litre water

300g sugar

Wash berries and place all ingredients into a heavy based pan.  Bring to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 5 mins.  Strain and bottle.

It tastes very nice, we all liked it.

The alcohol based version was to soak the blackberries with cinnamon, cloves and/or allspice with sugar (half the volume of the blackberries - so 4 cups of berries was 2 cups of sugar) in 1 1/2 cups of vodka or brandy for 2 - 4 weeks. Strain and bottle.

I may yet try this one too - a grown up cordial and a child-friendly cordial.

Yesterday, I went berry picking again.  This time I picked half a kilo of wild blackberries.  I’ve made a second batch of child-friendly cordial - this time I added the juice and peel of one orange.  It’s a little sweeter and tastes better than the first batch.  I’m considering adding apple peel to the berries for my next batch.

We’re also considering growing the blackberries up the fences.  That would keep them controlled, more easily accessible and provide shelter in the paddocks.  Multi-purpose is always good.  I don’t think they’d require a great deal of care either.  They’re taking over the more untamed land we have quite successfully as it is, with no help from anyone.

Plum Jam

Something we are blessed with here on our block, is several plum trees.  Great big old trees they are too.  Mostly they're those little red plums with yellow flesh that are rather sweet, but sickly sweet if left to go overripe.

The top part of the tree - taken from the top of the gully.

Last year, I only managed to pick the very bottom branches of the biggest tree.  That still became 9 litres of plum sauce, plus a large quantity of plum jam that my Mum made from the plums that she and Dad came and picked.

One tree I couldn't get close enough to, to be able to pick anything.  It was completely surrounded by thick gorse.  Another, I didn't realise was yellow plums and they all fell down while I was waiting for them to 'ripen'.  The remainder on my biggest and most prolific tree were cleaned up by the bulls that broke in.

Plums in varying stages of ripeness.

A couple of weeks ago, I checked the tree that had been fenced in by gorse last year.  When Hubby was cutting gorse this last winter and spring, I made a specific request that he clear around this tree.  There were quite a few plums, not quite ripe yet, but not too far away, so Miss Seven and I made it a plan to check it once a week.  We went and had a look to find no sign of any plums at all.  We've had some pretty rough weather lately, so I'm assuming that the wind got them.  Bugger.

We did the rounds, having a look at blackberries, elderberries and plums in all the spots where they grow and we can actually get near them.  We should have the first blackberries soon - in one patch there are the odd black ones, but quite a few red ones.  Elderberries are still not ripe, we'll check them again in a week's time.  But the plums are starting to ripen.

We picked about a kg from that prolific tree  It's quite fascinating the way that tree ripens.  It's down the gully in quite a narrow spot.  The plums start coming ripe on the north side first and take about a month more to ripen around on the south side.  There are a lot more plums still to ripen, they hang like grapes and bend the branches down from about 5m up to touch the ground.

The next question was, what would we do with these plums?  While my family love plum sauce, we still had plenty left from last year.  Hubby likes jam, but doesn't tend to eat a lot of it and Miss Seven doesn't seem to eat much jam at all.  I thought about it for a while and thought that perhaps if she were involved in making the jam, she might eat more of it.  So I asked her.

Plum Jam it was. :)

Plums simmering down to pulp.

The recipe in my old battered Edmonds Cookery Book called for 2.7kg plums.  After washing and sorting, I had 900g - time to divide the recipe by 3.  This meant I needed 650g of sugar.

At the same time I was making Strawberry Jam with the strawberries I'd picked (a handful at a time) and frozen.  This was a very bad idea.  I ended up with too much going on at once (and trying to sterilize my jars) and overcooked both jams.  They're both very thick and I left some burnt bits on the bottom of the pans.

That said, they still taste great.

Wild Rabbits and Myxomatosis

Over the last week or so, Remus, our 9 month old puppy has been finding rabbits.  Some he's caught (and not always killed himself - that has been Hubby's job) and some he's found already dead.

We found one yesterday when we were picking plums down the gully.  It seemed to be quite fat and healthy, with no noticeable marks on it.  It was just dead.  We quickly restrained the dog.  We didn't know what had killed this rabbit and so didn't want to risk having the dog eat it.  We weren't quite so quick with the next two he found later on last night.  One of them, I did manage to take off him.  Once he realised I wasn't going to play a game of chase for it he lost interest.  It showed no signs of damage at all.

I rang the neighbour this evening, to ask if he knew if anyone was or would be poisoning rabbits.  To me, it's not normal for what appears to be a healthy rabbit to just drop dead.  I would have expected some sort of wasting or thinness to be signs of disease.  He didn't think so, but mentioned myxomatosis.  Apparently, like fleas (well, as it turns out - with fleas), myxomatosis becomes more active with warmer weather and he hasn't seen the volume of rabbits around that he'd normally expect.  When I told him how fat and healthy these rabbits appeared to be, he commented that they found some like that on the farm in Waipara that he does some work at.  He didn't think it would affect the dog.

I spent about ten minutes on Google after this.  First trying to spell it, then reading a little about it on Wikipedia.  I haven't spotted any of the tumours on the rabbits I've seen, but Hubby said he has.  Another bash on Google to find out if eating an infected rabbit will harm my dog and that came back as a no.  It only affects rabbits.

That's quite a relief.  I don't want to keep Remus confined all the time and if I don't, he's going to be finding and chewing on, if not eating, these dead rabbits.

Making Cheese

My best friend gave me a cheese making kit for Christmas!  She sent me the Camembert kit from CottageCrafts.  The kit contained:

2 Camembert hoops

2 pieces of cheesecloth

A 3ml pipette

Camembert starter culture

P. Candidum culture

A cooking thermometer with clip

Vegetable rennet

Wraps for camembert

Instruction booklet (includes a couple of other cheeses)

Iodine based solution for sterilisation with its own pipette

I read through the instructions and saw that it takes a month to cure so instead of having some camembert ready for her visit for New Years (she lives in Australia), I decided to make it with her when she came to stay with us.  We waited until the New Year’s party (a large regular event for us) was over and done with and we were all sufficiently recovered from it. 

She was quite surprised when I said I hadn’t watched any of the cheese-making clips on youtube, I’d just read a few instructional books and articles.  I’m glad that she had watched these clips - some parts of the process, I think, are easier when you’ve seen how others do it and there were a few times when I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to look like that.

Camembert

4 litres of milk was raised to 32 deg Celsius and 1/16th of a tsp of starter culture and the tip of a pointy knife of P. Candidum culture added.  The tip of a pointy knife wouldn’t fit inside the small tube, so it became the tip of a bamboo skewer twice. Left to sit for 30 mins.

2ml of rennet in 20 mls of cooled boiled water was added and it was left to sit for another 45 mins. Fortunately, through watching the youtube clips, my friend was able to tell me when it was ready - when it’s set, a cut will make a ‘clean break’ and separate.  Cut the curd into 2cm cubes.  Again the youtube clips helped - cutting down in two ways in a 10 litre stock pot (up and down and sideways) was easy, but how to do the cuts through the depth? I had thought I’d be turning it out onto a board and cutting it (yeah, that would never have worked). The trick to it is to angle your knife and make cuts from the top to the side of the pot, going around in quarters.  Difficult to describe, but simple if you see it done.  While the recipes all say cubes, they’re never perfect, even cubes.  Let sit for 5 mins.

Turn the curds.  Well, the top layers were nice cubes but at the bottom it was a bit different.  Here’s where I was looking at it wondering if I’d done it wrong.  Underneath, the stuff that was coming on top with the turning looked more like watery cottage cheese.  But this is fine.

Curds turned twice more at 10 minute intervals.  Drain off a third of the whey and replace with the same amount of cooled boiled water.  Draining off the whey wasn’t as easy as it sounded.  We poured cupfuls through cheesecloth and returned the curds caught in the cloth to the pot.

Turn the curds twice more at 10 minute intervals.  Drain off half the whey and ladle curds into the sterilised hoops.  The recipe said to have the hoops sitting on a draining tray covered with a sushi mat and then cheesecloth.  We weren’t quite sure what we were going to use for this, I don’t have sushi mats for a start.  My dehydrator trays worked brilliantly and I have a large bowl that the tray was able to sit over.  The curds filled the two hoops, looking somewhat like cottage cheese at this point.

After nearly a day in the hoops

The curd filled hoops are inverted at intervals, using another cloth lined tray and left overnight - basically to roughly 24 hours after starting. Then removed from hoops and soaked in a 20% brine mixture for an hour.  Here’s another point where we stopped.  20% brine?  1 cup of salt to 1 litre of water.

Dry cheese on a rack for another 24 hours.  Then stored for 10 days to ripen at 11-15 degrees. The cheese needs to be turned every two or three days. I figure that our little scullery room that doesn’t get any direct sunlight should work for this.  The hard part will be keeping it safe from flies and dust but still able to let the air at it.  Then wrapped in foil (the wraps that came with the pack) and stored for another week at 11-15 degrees.  Ready to eat after three to four weeks.  We haven’t gotten to this part yet, we’ve only just brined the cheese.  I will do an update when we have.  I am enjoying watching a large amount of milk turn into two small cheeses though.

Hubby looked at our two small hoops filled with curds and asked how much milk had gone into it.  Disbelief was expressed (and not politely) and costs were questioned - whether this was cheaper than just buying camembert.  So we did the maths.  That day, I’d bought two small camembert wheels - $4 each for 110g cheeses.  This kit was supposed to make two 250g cheeses - so we were looking at $16 (plus some) worth of cheese.  Two litres of milk is somewhere between $3.50 and $4.50 depending on where you buy it, so we were clearly making a saving.  He was content with that.

Some of the whey

We had saved all the whey that we’d drained off.  There was a ricotta recipe that uses whey in the instruction booklet and I’d recently seen an article in the December 2012 issue of the Lifestyle Block magazine that had uses for whey.  One said to use the whey within one hour of draining it off and the other said within two hours, so once we’d poured the curds into the hoops I started to heat the 2 1/2 litres of whey that we already had.

Ricotta

Once the whey had reached approx 60 degrees celsius, we added milk and salt - the recipes vary a little here.  One had 5 litres of whey, two cups of milk and 1 tsp of salt.  The other didn’t specify how much whey, only one cup of milk and no salt.

Ricotta hanging

We heated the whey up to 95 and added diluted vinegar (40ml vinegar in 200ml water).  Both recipes mentioned white vinegar, but I had none of this.  A little time spent on Google told us that many cheese makers use apple cider vinegar with no noticeable difference to the cheese, so that was what we used.  As soon as the curd starts forming stop adding vinegar.  Let it sit for five minutes and put into a colander lined with cheese cloth.  The youtube clips came in handy here too.  Different from both recipes was to hang the cloth to let it all drain properly.

We still had some whey left over so I wanted to try something else I’d seen in the magazine article. 

Gjetost (also known as Mysost)

Gjetost is a Norwegian sweet cheese - pronounced Yay-toast according to one of the websites we went looking at this morning.

Basically this is made by simmering the whey down to a fudge-like consistency and pouring it into a greased pan (like fudge) and cooling quickly.  As I write this, I’ve started simmering the whey.  I may even do this one twice - once with the whey that has come straight from the camembert and once with the leftover whey from making ricotta - whey from whey cheese.  I don’t know if the whey from the ricotta will be useful, but I’d rather try it and find out than tip it down the sink.

My first batch of Gjetost is done.  One litre of whey makes about half a cup of this.  Mine didn’t brown and I’m wondering if I took it off too early.  I was just a little disturbed when there was no liquid left in the pan and just some slightly off-white stuff - looked more like coconut ice than fudge to be honest.  It tastes similar at the moment to Barfi(sp) a Hindi sweet treat I was given a few times at Diwali.  Actually, if I recall correctly, Barfi is made from milk and sugar.  This lacks the aftertaste I’m guessing whatever causes this went into the curds.

Some discussion and thought has raised the suggestion that I didn’t actually simmer it.  I kept it on a very low setting and didn’t see any bubbles rising at all.  We’ve turned the heat up on the second batch to see if it makes a difference.  We also looked on some cheese making forums and found quite a useful discussion on gjetost.  In this forum, someone said that the only reason you don’t boil it is that it will make it scorch.

Second batch was no good.  This was using the leftover whey after making ricotta.  Two litres simmered down without thickening or going brown and when my back was turned for only five minutes it burned.

We’re also wondering if the problem came from having left the whey overnight before making the gjetost.  Perhaps it should have been made immediately like the ricotta.

We ran out of cheese cloths, with so many things going at once so a new unopened packet of chux-style cloths came out.  I’ve used these for straining all sorts of things and find that as long as they’re new and haven’t been used for anything else, they’re great.  After straining a jelly or in this case cheese through them, they can be washed and used for cleaning.

My New Dehydrator

One of the things that has been on my wish list for quite a while is a dehydrator.  I usually dry things like herbs in my oven and while this isn’t particularly power intensive (and a whole lot quicker and cleaner than hanging) it can be quite inconvenient.

My credit card collects points that can be used as cash in some stores.  I had quite a bit saved up on my rewards and for Christmas I was given a voucher for one of the stores where I can use my rewards.  That was it, I was on a mission. 

I found only one type of dehydrator there and only one in stock!  It was meant to be mine.  With the Boxing Day Sale discounts, my Sunbeam Food Dehydrator was a steal at $105!

As soon as I got home I was determined to try it out.  Herbs went in first.  The booklet with the dehydrator said that on the lowest setting (approx 35 deg Celsius) they should take 2 - 4 hours.  I increased it to the second setting (approx 55 deg Celsius) and it still took more than the 2 - 4 hours.

Fruit Leather

I wanted to dry some apples.  Miss Seven likes apples, but often doesn’t get through them.  I had been drying them in the oven, but this was just as inconvenient (probably more so) than drying herbs as it takes longer.  I sliced up four apples which filled up 3 of the trays.

The dehydrator also has a fruit leather tray, so I thought I might as well give that a go at the same time.  There was some fruit salad left over from Christmas day so that went through the blender and just filled the tray nicely.

The apples took a little longer than the 10 - 14 hours in the book, but turned out just fine.  The fruit leather took even longer. It still tastes great.  A reread of the book has made me realise that I should have drained the fruit salad first.  We’re now trying nectarines that I had bottled with a little honey and cinnamon.  They’ve come out a little tart, but still quite nice.

I wanted to use up the bananas that we weren’t going to get through, but by the time the apples were ready, they’d already gone  bit far - the skins were mostly black, so they’re in the freezer waiting for me to start baking banana cakes and muffins.  I’ve since bought some more and sliced two up and dried them.

My Prolific Grapevine

The grapevine that was here already is absolutely covered in grapes.  It’s really quite amazing how much is growing there.  They’re green grapes and I don’t drink white wine, so I have no intention of making any (unless I make it for vinegar) but I can’t stand waste.  I’d been wondering what I could do with so many grapes.  While Miss Seven loves grapes, there was no way she’d get through the mass loads that are growing.

I’m hoping to use the dehydrator to turn these grapes into sultanas or raisins.  I don’t know if these grapes are seedless (the chooks ate what grew last year) so I’m sure that deseeding a lot of grapes will get old really fast, maybe it’s something that I can do in smaller batches on a daily basis.