Sloe gin

I've been biking to DTU and back lately (c. 27 km round trip). There have been some beautiful frosty mornings, with a view over the waking city once I've gotten up the Bellahøj hill. And a long curve past Utterslev Mose in the mist, and a last push through a horse school... Near there, in the last bit through Lyngby, when it feels like you've really left the city, I spotted a patch of blackthorn bushes right by the bike path. I couldn't resist stopping to pick some into my empty lunchbox on the way home, in the gathering gloam. I froze them in the freezer overnight to simulate the first frost and to let me make sloe gin when I wanted.

225 g sloes
4 oz sugar
500 ml gin

Put sloes and sugar in a large bottle with a wide enough neck. Add gin, put lid on securely, and shake. Shake every so often over the next few days to make sure the sugar dissolves. Then leave in a dark cupboard, shaking occasionally, for a few months or a year.

Raspberry chia kombucha

I long meant to experiment with adding things to my kombucha. I also long meant to open and eat the bag of chia seeds in the drawer. Eventually I made this. It is the simplest ever, and it tastes amazing.

Approx. 250 ml kombucha
about 6 frozen raspberries
1 tbsp chia seeds

Pour the kombucha into a glass bottle with a lid. Crumble the frozen raspberries into the bottle, and pour in the chia seeds. Invert a few times to mix, and make sure the chia seeds are not clumping too much. Leave at room temperature or in the fridge for at least an hour. Keeps fine for at least a day in the fridge.


It's pink and full of gloopy chia seeds and sweet and tangy and lovely. And only takes a few seconds to assemble.

Kombucha

I tried and tried to grow my own kombucha mother / SCOBY from bottles of bought kombucha. But nothing worked. They didn't go wrong or go gross, just nothing grew. I asked around and noone knew of anyone making it. At last it arrived, from an unexpected source - S's PhD student has a friend doing some food science study with kombucha. So she got some mother for herself from her friend, and once it was big and strong enough she gave me some. Huzzah!

I started it nearly 2 weeks ago, on sweet Earl Grey tea. My first harvest was yesterday, after 12 days. The new mother was about 3 mm thick, and the kombucha was a little sweeter and less fizzy than I would have liked, but not too vinegary and really very good. Very pleased indeed!

You will need:
Large jar with wide mouth (ideally wide enough to fit your hand in)
Clean cloth to cover top of jar (clean tea towel is a good weave)
Rubber band to secure cloth
Bottle with lid to store kombucha after it is made
Jug or funnel to help with pouring kombucha into jars etc

Enough freshly-brewed black or green tea to fill the jar (mine holds about 1.5 litres; I used Earl Grey)
Sugar (about 5 tbsp for 1.5 litres)
about half a cup of kombucha from the previous batch
SCOBY

Method:
Do your best to keep everything clean and sterile - wash glassware in the dishwasher if you have one; dry upside down in a 110C oven; use while hottish.

Make the tea and let it cool to anywhere between room and body temperature. Add the sugar and stir until it is completely dissolved. Mix in the kombucha from the previous batch, then transfer the liquid to the large jar. Add the SCOBY. Cover with the cloth and secure with a rubber band. Leave at room temperature for 1-2 weeks. Remove a little with a spoon to test after a week and again later if not yet ready, but do not open too often to avoid contamination.

When the kombucha smells and tastes good (ie slightly vinegary and sour but not off), you are ready to harvest it. Remove the SCOBY and transfer to a bowl along with about half a cup of kombucha. If you do not want to make another batch immediately you can cover this and keep in the fridge for weeks. Pour the rest of the kombucha into a bottle, cover and store in the fridge - it is ready to drink!

Start another batch as before. If you don't want to make more kombucha right away you can store the SCOBY in some kombucha in a sealed container in the fridge until you do.

You can use any kind of green or black tea (or mixtures), and flavours such as ginger juice can be added when bottling. I am yet to experiment with adding flavours, and also with tweaking the recipe to optimize fizziness and sweet/sour balance - watch this space!

Sanddorn / sea buckthorn / havtorn

Our bike foraging mission around Amagerfælled resulted in a good collection of blackberries, and also a flush of bright orange sea buckthorn berries.

I remembered trying to collect these with my Mum, and failing as they exploded / were too thorny to get at. These weren't such big problems this time - perhaps the berries were a little underripe? Slow going though, they are small and you have to move slowly to avoid the thorns.

Having collected a couple of pints, we got home and wondered what to do with them. I decided to keep it simple, and just heated the berries in a covered pan until they started to pop, then squashed them with the back of a wooden spoon. I strained the resulting mush, and ended up with a cup or two of thick, very bright orange juice that looks like mango juice but is quite sour. I liked it mixed with maple syrup to take the edge off, then either mixed through plain yoghurt or in these drinks.

Sanddorn and maple syrup fizz

Mix a couple of tbsp sanddorn juice with a couple of tsp maple syrup, then top up glass with fizzy water and mix. The colour is wonderful and the syrup takes out some of the sharpness from the sanddorn so you can taste it better.

Havtorn gin and tonic

Add a couple of tbsp havtorn juice to a gin and tonic with ice. Perhaps a little maple syrup to taste if you find it too sour.


Note: the sanddorn juice could be saved for future use by freezing - it won't keep more than a week or so in the fridge.

Hot toddy

This was cobbled together from the contents of my cupboards, on a snowy Saturday evening. The ginger wine is unorthodox but it seemed appropriately warming; I used bitter orange instead of lemon because it's what I had, also because I thought it might be good.

(makes two)

~1/2 cup whiskey
~1/2 cup ginger wine
juice of one seville orange and ~5 strips of zest
1/2 tsp honey
~1/2 cup hot water
2 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
1 green cardamom pod

Put all ingredients in a small pan. Heat very gently until almost boiling. Strain through a sieve into a jug, pour into small mugs and sip.

Elderflower cordial

My mother used to make elderflower champagne, and I remember helping her with it as a child: first we went out flower picking (ones away from the road), then we mixed them with sliced citrus and sugar to make the most beautiful mixture in a big earthenware bowl. Then it was strained and bottled and left to ferment. There is a story about once finding holes in a corrugated iron roof after the lids burst off bottles of elderflower champagne left in a shed.

I've made elderflower champagne myself several times, but ultimately decided that cordial is easier and more efficient: it is ready to drink sooner, it is more concentrated so less voluminous and easier to store, and there is less chance of lids blowing off bottles (although it doesn't keep as long without freezing).

I have rarely found elder in New England. But we came across a bush while biking around in Belmont at the weekend. The heads were huge: wider across than my own head. So I think it was perhaps a different species from the wild, British one, but it smelled good, so I thought it was worth turning into cordial anyway.

~20 heads of elderflower
1 lb sugar
1 1/2 litres of water (500ml boiling, 1000ml cold)
2 lemons (one large, one small), thinly sliced
1 lime, thinly sliced
1 1/2 tbsp citric acid

Wash the elderflowers gently and remove any bugs. Put the sugar in a large, heatproof bowl and pour the boiling water over. Stir until the sugar is dissolved, then add the cold water. Test the temperature with your finger (it should feel colder than body temperature), and if it feels OK add the lemons, lime and citric acid. Stir to dissolve the citric acid, then add the elderflowers and stir again. Cover with a clean cloth and leave for 24-48 hours, stirring occasionally. When ready, strain through a fine sieve or a piece of muslin, then bottle (using a funnel or a jug). It will keep for approx a couple of weeks in the fridge. To keep for longer, put in plastic bottles (or a tub, or ice cube trays) and freeze. With a tub, you can scoop enough for a glassful out at a time: it doesn't freeze very hard as it has so much sugar in it.


Yes!!! Last time I made elderflower cordial in the US it didn't really work - the elderflower taste didn't come through and I wondered if there might be something in the environment that was different and scuppered the taste. But this one is good. I left it for 48 hours instead of the 24 I usually do, although with it being so hot I wondered if I should have left it in the fridge. Anyways, we had some last night, at our picnic, diluted with fizzy water, and it was good.

Notes: I saved the lemons, limes and elderflowers left after straining the cordial and used them to make this marmalade. I also dried out the flowers that fell off the flowerheads and didn't make it into the cordial mix and used them to make biscuits.

Mulberry harvest: mulberry shrub / mulberry and mint fizz

I went on my first harvest with the Somerville League of Urban Canners on Saturday. We collected mulberries. Mulberries are beautiful fruit - they look like little, slim blackberries but grow on trees and have a taste all of their own (and come in red, white or black) - and the North American ones are, in my opinion, the best. A group of eight went out on bikes with tarps and hooks on long poles, and came back with 67 lb of mulberries from three trees. Seriously awesome: a wonderful day.

Everyone was talking about shrub, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I used this simple recipe. Most of the berries I brought home (about 3 lb total) went to jam (to return to LUrC), but I took out a couple of cups for experiments - this and pickled berries.

Mulberry shrub
(Made a quarter of this recipe - ended up with ~ 1 1/2 cups of shrub)

1 cup sugar
1 cup water
4 cups mulberries
2 cups red wine vinegar

Put sugar and water in a saucepan and heat, while stirring, until the sugar has all dissolved. Add mulberries and bring to the boil. Boil, while mashing the berries with a fork, for about 10 min. Add vinegar, bring to the boil and boil for about 2 min. Remove from the heat, drain, allow to cool, and then decant into a glass jar or bottle and store in the fridge.


Mulberry and mint fizz

~2 tbsp mulberry shrub
leaves from 1 sprig of mint
2 cups fizzy water


Interesting. I find the vinegary taste a bit too distracting. Less so when fizzy and minty.