The Trough

Quinces in a glass dish

The name, the form and the texture all go back to the days of still life paintings. The colour of Vermeer’s blues, khaki and bright electric yellows all summed up in a Quince. The furry almost fake, flocked surface can be stroked away to reveal it’s firm knobbly yellow cheeks beneath.
A stunning fruit that has obsessed me this autumn.

Quince pulp on the left and the strt of hours of boiling on the right

Sophisticated and bright for these changing October days. I was spilling over with excitement seeing a bag full of quince, when Mark, an apple grower, suggested I take them home and transform them in return for a little of what ever they were made into.. So my Sunday afternoon, after chopping, boiling, pushing and pushing and endlessly boiling, I made my first quince cheese.

The fruit browns almost instantly and is as solid as a rock – turning the same colour as those skin coloured crayons from school. First you boil it for around 45mins and the push it through a colander to release the pulp. Turning it from a jelly (where gravity does all the work) into a Cheese. The juice and pulp that is extracted is then warmed with sugar (600ml liquid = 400g sugar) and then boiled… for ages. In this time it turns from yellow juice to peach and then a dark vermilion. Concentrated in a pan loosing around 2/3rds of it’s volume.

changing colour as is becomes more concentrated

I have now spent around an hour peeling off nasty old labels from jars and washing them in preparation for sterilisation, despite a great tip an old flatmate let me in on. Wrap a wet cloth around the jar over night . This lets the label soak so it comes of really easily. You can leave them to soak for 40 mins to the same effect.

Another trick worth sharing was given to me by Margret from ‘Ourganics’ in Dorset, a wonderful jam maker! Have a cold saucer to hand and dollop a sample of the jam on it. If after it cools your finger runs through it and it wrinkles, the jam is set. If it fills the path behind your finger it will need a little longer. My tests ended up looking like an artists pallet as the liquid became richer. As the cheese sets, it begins to bubble slower – at the speed of molten lava, and it will have gone the colour of dark red velvet.

You have to leave it for a few months before it is ready to eat with a nice slab of strong cheese…. mmmmm Thank you Mark!

When the bubbles become thicker it is nearly ready

Only two jars, but its done!

This entry was posted by Gallus bankiva on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 12:38 pm. It is filed under cooking and has these tags: cheese, jars, preserving, quince. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.