I thought I’d update you a on my plum shrub syrup. It certainly has changed over the past couple of months. It’s gotten sweeter and less vinegary – that tang is still there, though, but it’s certainly mellower.
I really like how it’s changed – I think it’s much more balanced and actually more syrupy. It goes great in sparkling water; I haven’t tried it with alcohol. When I use it in sparkling water, I find that these days I want to use more syrup than I did at the beginning of its life. When it was younger, a little went quite a long way.
I would say to those who experiment with the shrub and find it way strong for their taste, just wait longer and the syrup will mellow out. And become more delicious, of course.
I’ll definitely be making shrubs again for many summers to come.
You may be aware that the greater food blog community is banding together to help fellow food blogger and writer Jennifer Perillo, who lost her husband Mikey suddenly (heart attack) and tragically earlier this month. It happened with no warning, with no time to prepare – it took Jennie utterly and completely by surprise, in the worst way.
I’ve had someone taken from me like this before and it’s just awful; my heart breaks for Jennie. I learned about what happened while at the end of my time in Washington State. I remember reading the news and just feeling so sad, and then a sense of urgency in getting home to be with T overtook me. I’ve been feeling even more grateful that we are together these days, in light of this (and other various natural disasters/events as of late).
Right now, Jennie is forced to deal with some tough real life issues that revolve around money. She can’t collect widow’s benefits from Social Security because she makes “too much money” yearly; her health insurance payments for her and her girls are coming and are crazy expensive; her name wasn’t on the mortgage – it was totally in Mikey’s name – so there are money issues with that. In short: she needs some serious help on the financial front.
That’s where we all come in. You, me, everyone – we’re raising money for Jennie. She’s in a real pickle financially – and that’s putting it lightly – but there is a way to make this burden lighter for her. Please consider donating to Bloggers Without Borders, a new non-profit with the purpose of enabling bloggers to help others in need, “where the strength and good will of the blogging community could easily be harnessed.” They’ve got a bank account set up and Paypal account and everything; this is the real deal.
The first project is helping alleviate Jennie’s financial ordeal, if only for a little while. They’re calling it A Fund for Jennie.
I’ve donated, personally, but I’m also contributing to a collection of preserves as part of a larger auction. Kate at Snowflake Kitchen has put together a collection of almost two dozen different preserves, jams and pickles, from a whole lot of bloggers-who-can, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. My contribution to the mix is a jar of plum vanilla jam, which I think is pretty excellent stuff. I made it last week from the plums growing on the trees in my backyard.
Plum vanilla jam and Nettle Meadow chevre on sprouted wheat bread
And at this writing, the bidding has reached $325!
If you’d like to bid on this amazing package of home preserved food, please go to Kate’s post, Jars for #afundforjennie and leave a comment with your bid. Bidding will conclude on Friday September 2nd at 11:59pm EDT. Shipping to the US and Canada only.
If this is too rich for your blood (I know how that can be, as someone who is currently unemployed), please consider donating straight to Bloggers Without Borders. Truly, any amount will help. You can do that below:
Please give as much as you can – truly, any amount is welcome and will be embraced. And you’ll be helping Jennie, a kind soul who really needs our assistance during a very difficult time. Thanks for considering this!
I’m a big fan of lacto-fermented foods, and I especially like lacto-fermented vegetables. I love sauerkraut but I especially love fermented root vegetables. I fell in love with them after the fermentation workshop I took with Andrew Faust a few years ago. There is just something magical about how all vegetables change in the fermentation process.
Of course, lacto-fermentation shoots up the nutritional value of what is fermenting, especially the vitamin C levels. Natural probiotics and beneficial enzymes also flourish. This is yet another reason to consume such foods.
When I got back from Washington, I looked in the fridge and saw that I had some CSA carrots and radishes left over. I thought fermenting them would be a great way to preserve them. The carrots were tiny, so grating them would have been a pain (perhaps even literally, as I was using a box grater), so I decided to slice them thinly into rounds, just as I was slicing the radishes. Then I figured that onions and garlic would be a nice addition.
Finally, I wanted to make them spicy. I didn’t have any fresh peppers on hand but I did have a bunch of dried ones. I love smoky and tangy together, so I chose to use a few of my dried chipotles.
I also wanted to use a brine with a smaller percentage of salt. More salt means the food with ferment faster, but lately I’ve been dissatisfied with the saltiness of the end product. I’d been using this brine: 1 tbs of salt to 1 cup of water. I referred to Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation, and saw that he uses a weaker brine for some things: 3 tbs salt to 4 cups water. I decided to try it out, though I did halve it, as I wasn’t making a huge batch of vegetables.
I am very happy with the results of this ferment! It took a little longer to get to where I wanted, but I love the salt level, flavor-wise. But I love how it’s turned out – it’s not overly salty at all, it’s smoky, spicy, and tangy. Perfect!
Carrot Radish Chipotle Ferment
1 pound carrots, cleaned and thinly sliced (do not peel)
1 pound radishes, thinly sliced
1/4 white onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half
3 chipotle peppers, softened in warm water
1.5 tbs sea salt
2 cups warm water
Combine carrots, radishes, onion, and garlic in a large bowl.
After the chipotles have softened a bit, slice into four pieces, stem to blossom end. Add to the vegetables.
Mix the sea salt and water until the salt dissolves. Add it to the vegetables.
Scoop vegetable mixture into washed, sterilized mason jars – either two pint jars or one quart jar. Top off with remaining liquid.
Tighten lid – but not too tight – and store in a warm, dark area for 3-5 days. Check after a few days and see if you like it. Leave a little longer if you don’t. Check each day, and when it is to your liking, store it in the refrigerator.
Makes 4 cups.
This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
This season I’ve been preserving often, and that makes me very happy. The processes are fun, and I love the idea of having food on the shelves/in the fridge that I can enjoy when the food in its natural state would be past its prime. I plan to continue preserving food throughout the summer – my next big project will be canning tomatoes in August or September.
Earlier this year, I was taken by this DIY handbook published by the NY Times. I ended up making Vin d’Orange and Maple Vinegar. I’ve been enjoying the Vin d’Orange all summer, and it really just screams “warm weather” to me. I drink it mixed with sparkling water and it’s very refreshing.
Vin d'Orange brewing
I also made the maple vinegar, which is pretty good. It’s made of raw cider vinegar, maple syrup, and rum. It still has a bit of an alcohol kick to it, which is a bit odd. Still, it’s fantastic as part of a vinaigrette on salad. That’s my favorite way to use it.
As far as this DIY handbook, I still have plans to make the tomato chili jam and the kimchi. I’ve used up most of my preserved lemons, so I’ll need to make some of those again soon.
Apart from that, I’ve made apricot jam from the apricots off the backyard tree. I used a very basic jam recipe, and added some organic orange zest to it. I love that addition. I think in a lot of jams and preserves, the addition of orange is a wonderful flavor contribution.
Apricot jam
As I wrote before, strawberry lemon preserves were made at my home, as part of an event put together by my CSA. I was fortunate to be the recipient of a jar of these preserves by AJ.
The spicy cherry preserves I made are simply amazing. I love the combination of sweet-tart-spicy, and these cherries really deliver on this. I liked the half pint I made so much that I bought more sour cherries at the greenmarket and made another pints’s worth of sour cherry preserves! The cherries with some syrup mixed with sparkling water make for a nice, barely sweet soda.
I also used some of the sour cherries for a liqueur, which is coming along quite well.
I’ve started experimenting with simple syrups and made a very tasty mint simple syrup with the mint on my back deck.
With the last of the first yellow plums of the season, I made plum shrub syrup, which turned out beautifully. I like it in sparkling water, though it could be added to a wheat beer with pleasant results, especially if you like sour beers (I do).
If it’s not evident in this post, I’ll just say it – I love vinegar. So, I’ve made some vinegar pickles out of snap peas. They are very good, but I think next time I’ll make them spicier.
Snap pea pickles
I even did some short term preservation with the peaches and nectarines that were really ripe – sorbet! I sweetened it with sucanat and used a bit of the maturing sour cherry liqueur, and it turned out just so well. Sucanat – an unrefined sweetener – turns things a bit dark, but I’ll sacrifice a little bit of aesthetic beauty for something sweet that doesn’t mess so intensely with my blood sugar.
Lately, I’ve been on a preservation kick. So far, I’ve made jam/preserves, simple syrup, vinegar pickles, and now… shrubs. Actually, just one at this point.
Yes, shrubs. It sounds like a plant, but it’s a fruit syrup that basically consists of fruit, sugar, and vinegar in a 1:1:1 ratio. It’s another way to preserve seasonal fruit, hooray! And it’s easy to make.
My main reference in learning how to do this is this great article on Serious Eats, Cocktail 101: How to Make Shrub Syrups. Apparently the shrub was popular in Colonial America. They’d mix the shrub syrup with water, making for a refreshing summer drink. It pretty much got forgotten after refrigeration and products of the industrial food system became more and more popular in this country.
The shrub has been sort of “rediscovered” here in the 21st century – I actually first heard about the shrub at The Queens Kickshaw after our food swap. Ben, one of the owners, was experimenting with them. I tasted a few he had put together and they sure were vinegary and tasty, but I like the tang of vinegar, so it was all good with me. It wasn’t until I was poking around online that I came across the Serious Eats article that talked about making shrubs in more depth.
So, we got a lot of plums in last week’s CSA share, and by the beginning of this week, they were really starting to ripen. I wanted to do something with them to extend their life – I didn’t have enough for jam really, so the shrub was a perfect solution. I had a cup of raw apple cider vinegar in the fridge, too, and some organic sugar on the shelf. Everything I needed!
I decided to make my shrub with the cold-process method. This way, the raw vinegar would get to stay raw. There is a way to make a shrub by cooking the fruit, too, which is preferred by some people. With the cold-process method, the brightness of the fruit will shine through and be a strong match for the vinegar.
Yellow plums, washed, depitted, and quartered
I started by washing, pitting, and quartering enough yellow plums to make a cup of fruit. I then combined that with a cup of organic sugar. I stirred it together, put it in a glass bowl, covered it in foil, and set it in the refrigerator.
Plums mixed with organic sugar
I let the fruit macerate for 24 hours. At the end of the 24 hours, I was looking for fruit sitting in syrup created by its juices and the sugar, which is what I found.
Plums after 24 hours of macerating
Really ripe fruit would probably take less time to exude its juices and make a syrup, but even then you can leave the fruit in the fridge for a day. Even two or three days, it will be ok.
I then drained the fruit over a large stainless steel bowl, pressing the plums a little to get the last bits of juice out.
Draining the fruit
There was a bunch of sugar sitting on the bottom of the glass bowl, so I scraped that out and into the syrup.
Plum syrup
I then added a cup of raw cider vinegar to that, whisked it, then poured it into a bottle and capped it. Finally, I vigorously shook the bottle, attempting to dissolve some of the remaining sugar.
Plum syrup with raw vinegar added
I’ll likely have to shake the bottle more times to get the sugar to dissolve. The acids in the juice and vinegar will dissolve it all eventually.
I tasted it – it was tangy! And fruity. Reminded me of kombucha when it’s got a big tang. The shrub will mellow, though, and I’ll likely notice a substantial change in that direction after a week.
All in all, this is very exciting. I can see myself making shrubs all summer long. I expect the syrup would be great mixed with sparkling water, or make into this suggested cocktail from Serious Eats:
Pair a small amount of shrub (about half an ounce) with 2 ounces of vermouth or sherry. Top that with some seltzer or club soda.
It also might be good in wheat beer (just a splash) or with some gin.
Shrubs should last quite a while – at least a year in the fridge. Some believe you can keep it on the shelf instead, but I like my syruped drinks cold, so I’m just going to store mine in the refrigerator.
As far as the science behind the drink goes, here’s a great explanation from mixologist Neyah White:
When a shrub ages, it is like an ecosystem. The ambient yeast (yeast on the fruit itself and yeast from the air) turns the sugar into alcohol, and the acetobacter (the bacteria in unpasteurized vinegar) turns the alcohol into more vinegar. Eventually this will stabilize and not turn the whole shrub into fruit vinegar since the bacteria-induced pH change will stall out the yeast’s fermentation process (and thus the bacteria’s acetic acid-producing pathway).
Very cool. I like it when people talk about ecosystems in food.
So there you have it – shrubs!
This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
This week in our CSA share, we received sour cherries. I was really excited about that – they only come once a year and the window to access them is very short. They are gorgeous – I think they are prettier than sweet cherries.
Sour cherries
They are smaller than sweet cherries and quite sour. I was amazed at the CSA pickup site when my friend’s son just started eating them like they were sweet cherries, apparently unaffected by the puckeryness of the cherries (I tasted one on its own – way sour). But this kid has an amazing palate at 2 years old, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at what he gladly eats!
Anyway, for most of us, these are not snacking cherries. They are meant to be preserved or made into pie. I wanted to preserve them, so I chose two ways to do that – hot cherry preserves, and cherry liqueur.
The sour cherry liqueur was very simple – I took a cup of pitted cherries and mixed it with 3/4 cup of organic sugar. I put that in a quart sized mason jar (it took up about half the jar) and added a combination of vodka and dark rum to that – the original recipe specified white rum, but I didn’t have any, so I used what was in my cupboard. We’ll see how it is in a couple of months. I can’t imagine it will be horrible or anything.
I’ll stir the mixture once a week or so. It’s in the back of a cupboard that doesn’t get opened regularly, so the store-it-in-the-dark thing is taken care of. The liqueur should be ready mid-September.
The Hot Cherry Preserves took a little more work, but not much. I mixed 12 oz of pitted sour cherries with 2/3 cup of organic sugar, a vanilla bean, and two guajillo chiles and let that macerate in the fridge overnight. The next day I heated it up to boiling and let that cook for 10 minutes. I added a tsp of organic lemon juice to it, and after it all cooled down a bit I put it in a half pint jar, and then in the fridge, where it will stay until I eat all the cherries. That really might not take very long, too.
I didn’t think a half pint jar would be big enough at first, but after the cherries cooked down, it made a scant half pint. They’ll sit in my fridge and I’ll use them in cocktails. Sour and spicy is one of my favorite flavor combinations. I may have to pick up more sour cherries this week (assuming they are still around) tomorrow and make more preserves!
During last week’s canning workshop, I learned that all along I had been using my jar lifter wrong! Basically, I’d been using it backwards – using the black roller handles to grip the jars… which was always a bit precarious in hindsight. Here’s the way I was using it:
Wrong way to use the jar lifter (it's upside down)
And here’s the proper way to use it:
The right way to use the jar lifter
It makes sense to use it this way, because the red parts grip better, so there’s less chance to drop the jar. And they are curved to better fit the jars. I’m going to use my jar lifters properly this year, which I expect will make the process quite a bit easier.
And as far as the confusion as to which side is the handle and which is the gripper, I’ve learned that I am not alone in this respect… many thanks to AJ for setting me straight.
