Kiwifruit Jelly

Another trip to Canberra and another haul of kiwifruit!

Back in July 2014, at the peak of kiwifruit season, I helped pick kiwifruit from my girlfriend's family vines.  They were particularly abundant last year due to the way they had been pruned at the end of the 2013 season - the fruit was practically falling off the vines.

Picking kiwifruit, particularly when the vines have been grown over a pergola, is pretty labour intensive.  I would try to be strategic, get up on the ladder, reach for a large bunch, and give it a good yank, but inevitably that action would cause the surrounding fruit to rain down, mostly straight onto my head. It's like be pelted with hairy golf balls.

The other issue with picking kiwifruit is that a lot of them are too small to be eaten, or might be bruised or partially chomped on by birds.  We went through a sorting process to discard the dodgy ones, and then sorted the rest into smaller and larger sizes.  The larger ones were set aside to eat fresh, and I decided to use the smaller ones to make a kiwifruit jelly.

I had previously made kiwifruit jam using store-bought kiwifruit.  The store-bought variety are much less hairy than the variety we picked, and due to this hairiness, it would be difficult to make a jam - a lot of hair could easily have ended up in the mix with the fruit.

A jelly, as opposed to a jam, is strained through muslin, so I thought it would be perfect to take the jelly approach to filter out any incidental kiwifruit hair that made its way into the mix while processing the fruit.

Picking the kiwifruit is only the first step.  The next is to wait until they ripen.  Surprisingly, it took about three weeks to ripen and soften enough that we could scoop out the flesh. If you store the kiwifruit with other fruit, particularly bananas, the ripening process will be much faster.

The recipe I used is an adapted Feijoa jelly recipe.  The ingredients of the jelly are really simple - some lemon juice is added into the mix to help bring out the pectin.

The resulting jelly is really refined and delicious, but has a fantastic tanginess.  It also spreads really nicely across a piece of toast, and is even better with fresh scones!

Kiwifruit Jelly Recipe

Ingredients

• 2-3kg of kiwifruit;
• water;
• 1.5kg of white sugar.

Making the jelly:

1. Wash the kiwifruit to get rid of any excess hair.
2. Slice the kiwifruit in half.
3. Using a spoon, scoop out the flesh of the kiwifruit into a bowl, discarding the skin.  Try to get a few people to help you - this process can take a while, particularly if the kiwifruit are small.  
4. Place the kiwifruit flesh into a pot and add water to just below the level of the fruit. 
5. Bring the mixture to the boil and then turn the heat down. Simmer the fruit mixture for around 40 minutes until the fruit has broken down (see photo above).
6. Place a muslin cloth over a sieve and then strain the mixture through it.  Leave for a few hours until all of the syrup has been extracted.  If you push the mixture through it will affect the clarity of the jelly, making it more cloudy.
7. Return the syrup to a new pot, measuring it as you go. Then add 3/4 cup of sugar into the pot for every cup of syrup.  
8. Bring the mixture to the boil and reduce the mixture.  You will know when the jelly is ready by doing the cold saucer test (place a saucer in the freezer for 5-10 minutes until it is icy cold.  If you spoon a bit of the jelly on to the plate it should form a jelly-like glob rather than dispersing)
9. When the jelly is finished, pour it into sterilised jars.  

MeXO Sauce - XO Sauce with Chipotle, Ancho and Guajillo Chillies

  

One of my earliest posts on the Jarhead blog was about XO sauce, the decadent condiment from Hong Kong, which can give a regular stir fry a really good hit of umami.  I made some really tasty dishes from my first batch of XO – chicken and okra stir fry with XO sauce, pippies with XO sauce, and fried eggs with XO sauce on rice.  All really simple, but supremely delicious. 

Last time I used a recipe from chef Danny Bowien, but this time I decided to make a few changes and put my own spin on it.  I still had a lot of Mexican dried chillies lying around. I originally used them for my Chipotle Ketchup recipe, but I figured that the complex flavours of the ancho chilli, the spicy kick of the guajillo chilli, and the smokiness of the chipotle chilli, would all enhance an XO sauce. The dried chillies really added a layer of complexity to the flavour, but next time I would add in some extra chillies (fresh or dried) for stronger chilli hit. 

Dried scallops and shrimp form the basis of XO sauce.  Previously, I bought them from a Chinese supermarket in Haymarket.  But since my first batch of XO, I had walked past some stores in Sydney Chinatown that sold dried seafood, mostly dried abalone that tourists buy to bring home with them from Sydney.  I went to one of these stores on Sussex Street and found three different varieties of dried scallop and two types of dried shrimp.  The store was full of so many random types of dried seafood, but somehow I resisted buying any of the delectable-looking dried sea cucumbers.

One item that I omitted from my new recipe was a type of cured pork I found at a Chinese butcher shop.  I thought that it tasted pretty similar to the Chinese sausage and overwhelmed the flavour of the seafood.  A lot of the XO sauce recipes on the internet include Jinhua ham, which is a type of cured ham from the Chinese city of Jinhua.  Apparently prosciutto is a good substitute, so I sourced some good quality prosciutto from Harris Farm butcher at Potts Point to add to my sauce. 

Soaking the scallops and shrimp overnight to rehydrate them yields some flavourful cooking water.  Some recipes online call for the cooking water to be included, so I figured I’d take their advice and add some in when cooking the aromatics – I'm sure it enhanced the taste of the sauce.

Overall, I think the MeXO sauce tastes fantastic – actually a bit subtler than my first batch and more balanced.  My girlfriend preferred the first batch because it was spicier and had a stronger flavour – but perhaps I just need to spoon more of my new MeXO sauce into my next stir fry!

MeXO Sauce Recipe

What you need:

• 4 Guajillo chillies
• 6 small chipotle chillies
• 3 ancho chillies
• 150g of dried shrimp
• 150g of dried scallops
• 4 fresh long red chillies, roughly chopped
• 4 shallots, peeled
• 1 bulb of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled
• ¼ cup of sliced ginger
• 2 small chinese sausages sliced (approx ¼ of a cup)
• 5 slices of prosciutto, sliced
• 2 cups of canola oil
• 3 tablespoons of shaoxing rice wine
• 2 tablespoons of dark soy
• 3 tablespoons of fish sauce
• 2 teaspoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of sea salt
• ½ stick of cinnamon
• 2 star anise
• 1 teaspoon and a half of chilli flakes

Making the MeXO sauce:

1. Soak dried shrimp in a bowl with enough water to submerge. Similarly, soak the dried scallops in a separate bowl.  Leave both overnight to soften and rehydrate. 
2. The next morning, drain the shrimp and scallops, reserving  about a quarter of a cup of the soaking water from each (1/4 cup of scallop soaking water, ¼ cup of prawn soaking water).
3. Now prepare your dried chillies.  Cut the chillies open and scrape out the seeds and any pith (this is important, it will be horribly bitter if you leave them in).  Wipe off any dust on the surface of the chillies.
4. Heat a small pan, and toast the chillies on a low heat until they become fragrant and start to release their essential oils.  You don’t want to colour or burn them, just heat them up for a couple of minutes.
5. Place these toasted chillies into a bowl and cover with boiling water for about 30 minutes, until they have softened.  Drain and discard the water (again, important, bitterness awaits if you don't discard). 
6. Add your ginger, garlic, shallots and fresh chillies into a food processor and blitz until very finely chopped. 
7. In a large pot, heat about a third of the canola oil and slowly fry the processed aromatics. 
8. While these aromatics are frying, blitz your soaked shrimp and scallops in the food processor until they are very finely chopped.  Set aside.
9. When the aromatics have start to soften, add in the rice wine and cook off the alcohol for a couple of minutes. 
10. Now add in your reserved prawn and scallop water, and simmer on a high heat for about 5 minutes to reduce the mixture.  Pour the aromatics into a bowl and set aside.
11. Add the rest of the canola oil into the now empty pot, and then add in your finely chopped shrimp and scallops.  Fry this on a low heat until the shrimp and scallops look golden. 
12. In the meantime, add your soaked dried chillies from earlier, and the sliced Chinese sausage and prosciutto into the food processor and blitz. It should form a brown paste. 
13. Add this paste into the pot with the shrimp and scallops, and fry for another 5 minutes. 
14. Return the aromatic mixture you set aside earlier into the pot and stir to combine.  Drop in the cinnamon stick and star anise.
15. Add in the soy sauce, fish sauce and salt and simmer for 45 minutes on a low heat, stirring regularly to ensure none of the ingredients are sticking to the bottom of the pot or burning.
16. Remove whole spices.
17. Pour into sterilised jars.  

Pickled Octopus

You might remember my post a couple of weeks about making dill pickles from Kirby cucumbers that I found at the Sydney Markets at Flemington.  This trip to the markets was extremely fruitful (pun intended).  The Sydney Markets are expansive. There’s a plethora of fruit and vegetables, but you can also buy flowers and meat. 

I was also surprised to find that despite being in the middle of Sydney’s Western Suburbs, about 20km from the coast, there was an abundance or really fresh seafood.  While buying some prawns and a flounder for dinner, I spotted some nice looking octopus (if there is ever such a thing as nice looking octopus?) And I had always wanted to make pickled octopus…. So, without mentioning it to my girlfriend who was waiting for me patiently, I impulsively bought a whole kilo of slimy, tentacley goodness.  Later that week, one of my friends was hosting a thanksgiving dinner, and I had promised to pickle something.  So I thought I’d do something a bit different (and possibly completely incompatible with the other thanksgiving fare) and pickle a bit of octopus!  

The first time I tried pickled octopus was at Xanthi, a Greek restaurant in Westfield Sydney.  I remember it tasting like the essence of Greek cuisine. But I am no stranger to pickled seafood.  In my travels through Northern Europe I was lucky enough to try pickled herring in a few Scandinavian countries (something I do have plans to recreate when I figure out how and where to find herring in Australia).  While pickling seafood may, on the face of it, be a cooking method that people traditionally used to preserve their catch for later, I think it’s a great way to have seafood.  It pretty much takes the freshness of seafood, and adds a good bit of zing from the vinegar. 

In the batch I made followed the Mediterranean style -  I added lots of garlic (because who doesn’t love garlic) and some oregano and thyme for flavour.  Pickled octopus is perfect tossed through salads or just on its own – in our case straight out of the jar - as antipasti.  The key to the recipe below is how you cook the octopus.  Cooking it low and slow makes the flesh super tender, instead of being tough like octopus has a tendency to be. 

In the end, the octopus was really popular at the thanksgiving dinner (despite the fact that pickled seafood isn’t really one of your traditional American Thanksgiving dishes like turkey or pumpkin pie…) and I think I surprised a few of my friends who doubted that any type of vinegary seafood would ever be tasty.  

I also made a second batch to eat at home.  For dinner the other night, the pickled octopus was the star of a board of pickles, antipasti and cheese.  It was a great way to use some of the things I'd pickled previously, like the kirby cucumbers, daikon, zucchinis and golden beetroot.  I also got my hands on some great salami and prosciutto, and a triple cream brie.  Some fresh avocado and cherry tomatoes filled the gaps on the board.  Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Pickled Octopus Recipe

What you need:

• 1kg of octopus, which has been cleaned;
• Tablespoon of sea salt;
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon of dried thyme;
• 1 teaspoon of dried oregano;
• 1 teaspoon of peppercorns;
• 300ml of apple cider vinegar;
• 5 cloves of garlic.

The pickling:

1. First you need to cook the octopus.  Place the octopus in a pot along with 3 cloves of garlic that has been sliced thinly, the salt and bay leaves.  Fill the pot with water until the octopus is submerged and then bring to the boil and simmer for an hour and a half, until the octopus is super tender.
2. In the meantime, to make the pickling brine, pour the vinegar into a pot along with the peppercorns and herbs and 2 cloves of sliced garlic.  Bring this to the boil and then turn off the heat and allow to sit and infuse.
3. When the octopus is finished cooking, remove it from the water, and slice it into bite sized chunks.  Then place these chunks into a sterilised jar.
4. Finally bring the brine back to the boil.  Once it has reached the boil, pour the brine into the jar so that the octopus is submerged.  
5. Seal the jar and allow to sit for at least a day.  Keep refrigerated.