Roaming Zebra

Blackcurrants (Image Wikimedia Commons)

Last night was spent making up some blackcurrant sorbet as well as preparing to make blackcurrant jelly…

One of the other allotment holders has a number of blackcurrant bushes on one of their plots, and they very kindly offered to let us pick some blackcurrants from their bushes - they said they’d already taken huge numbers home, made jam, frozen them …. and there were still loads left on the plants (there still is now and we took a couple of kilos!).

Decided to make blackcurrant jelly rather than jam, given the number of tiny seeds in blackcurrants. Ended up grabbing a recipe from the Internet as my preserves and jams books doesn’t have blackcurrant jelly - mostly its knowing how much water and sugar to add for the type of fruit. Well, I left that dripping through the jelly bag overnight and now have a bowl of very finely sieved blackcurrent juice ready for the second stage (incidentally, I found that at the local supermarket, the “jam” sugar with added pectin was about 2/3rds the cost of normal granualted sugar, I’m sure jam sugar is normally considerably morse expensive!).

Also mixed up a batch of sorbet - we’ve had an ice cream maker for ages, but it can’t have been used for at least 5 years I guess (since we moved to the West Midlands at least…). Having prepared the sugar/syrup solution and cooled it, I found the drive link was missing from the ice cream maker, which then involved searching all the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen, all to no avail! I did however discover that the drive on our old food processor (which is still in the garage) was very similar in shape, so with the application of a hammer, screwdriver and a Stanley blade, I refashioned the drive so it fitted … and hey presto, 40 mins later, enough churning to transfer it to the freezer. We haven’t yet tried out the sorbet, so I don’t know if 40 mins was long enough or if the ice crystals will be too large and we’ll get a gritty sorbet… At least I don’t have to go with the manual option of freeze, blend, freeze, blend, freeze, blend ….. I think I’ll try and get the proper drive for the ice cream maker - looks like Partmaster have the drive and paddle available.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Aconcagua.