Nigel Slater Medlar Jelly

Nigel Slater Medlar Jelly

My favourite fruit jelly is medlar. I make my own at home because I have a small medlar tree, but you see it in the shops, too. Considering this fruit is so rare, I am amazed at the number of readers who ask how to make medlar jelly or how to stretch a small crop to go a long way. The medlar is a small, user-friendly tree, great for the domestic garden. I have had a bumper crop this year, with the fruits larger and more prolific than ever. Jelly is bubbling on the hob as I write, but yesterday I baked some around a pheasant. There is something fig-like about them when they are baked, sweet and rich.

Whenever there is talk of this fruit it is not long before the word "bletting" comes into the conversation. It is the name for the process of leaving the picked fruit to ripen to the point where they can be made into jelly. Iput mine on large dishes in a single layer in the kitchen. (They rot if you pile them up.) Over the next 10 days or so they darken and become soft. This is when they are ready to make jelly from. If the jelly is to set you will need a few hard, unripe medlars to provide the necessary pectin.

You can also bake medlars for dessert, leaving them to soften in a hot oven until they are tender and fruitily fragrant, then picking at them with a small spoon. The downside is they are fiddly to eat, but they are especially good with cream.

MEDLAR JELLY

To bletmedlars

Medlars are usually bought rock hard and have to be softened. Pull them off their leaves and place the whole fruits on ashallow plate. Don't pile them up. Leave them at a cool room temperature for aweek or two until they turn deep brown and are soft, almost squashy, to the touch. They are then ready to cook.

A quantity of hard, unblettedmedlars is essential for the jelly to set. Small, sharp apples, or even crab apples, will help, too. The jelly should be glossy and very soft. Keep its beautiful clarity by not stirring the fruit too much as they cook.

Makes about 4 jam jars
blettedmedlars1.6kg (see below)
firm medlars400g
lemons 3
apples 2 small, as sharp possible
water 2 litres
sugar about 800g

Remove any leaves from the medlars and check them well for any rotting patches. They should be dark and soft.

Slice the fruits in half and put them in a very large, deep saucepan. Halve the lemons and apples and put them in with the medlars. Pour over the water. Bring the water to the boil then lower the temperature and partially cover with a lid. Leave to cook for an hour.

Take care that the water doesn't evaporate, and give the fruit an occasional squash with a wooden spoon. Try not to stir or mash the fruit too much as this will send the jelly cloudy.

Pour the fruit and its liquid into a jelly bag suspended over a large jug or bowl. (I hang mine from the taps over the sink.) Let the juice drip into the jug, giving it the occasional squeeze until all the juice has dribbled through. You should be left with a dry lump of fudge-like medlar debris and a jug full of clear, amber-red juice.

Pour the juice back into the cleaned saucepan and boil hard for 6 minutes, then add an equal amount of sugar (about 800g or 4 cups). When the sugar has dissolved, boil for a further 2 minutes then ladle into clean, warm jars and seal. Leave to cool.

If your medlar jelly is still liquid by morning, pour into a large pan and boil for 4-8 minutes then return to the jars.

Comments

SAFETY FIRST: Beware: boiling fruit and jam will foam and increase in volume significantly - especially at the rolling boil stage - try to avoid more than half-filling your saucepan, jam kettle or stock pot to avoid boiling-over and a big sticky mess. It's better to do two batches than risk chaos and calamity that might put you off ever trying to make jam again. Stir gently - vigorous stirring can cause the mixture to suddenly erupt. WARNING: If you are using a gas hob NEVER leave jam or fruit boiling unattended - even if it looks like it is going to take a while. In the event the liquid does boil over it will almost certainly put the flame out and your house will slowly fill with gas. D A N G E R: Jam syrup is extremely hot, treat it like lava and keep kids/pets away when boiling and potting up. I noticed when testing for the set that the plate from the freezer was getting condensation on it and this was affecting the jam I was trying to test - wipe the plate dry with a tea-towel before blobbing the jam on

As for the conundrum about boiling to a set, the principle used in determining when a set has happened is really a very simple one. A set is reliably achieved when the Jam mix has been boiled long enough to have reached a temperature of 105c To get to this temperature, a certain amount of water has to have been boiled out of the mixture you have extracted such that the ratio of cooked sugars to water is such that the mix left, is sufficiently of sugar and or fruit pulp, for its boiling point to have been raised by approximately 5 degrees over the boiling point of water. Obviously if you use less water in the mix, the less you will have to boil away and the quicker you will get to the setting point. To test for a set you can either use a specific jam thermometer, an electronic temperature probe for food use, with a temperature scale which goes at least as far as 105 degrees celcius or, you can use the 'spoon and plate method' All are equally valid. Obviously the results from using the 'spoon and plate method' are open to a wide margin of interpretation but one way of being more certain with this method is, if you push your finger into the blob of jam on the plate, sometime after it has cooled (about a minute) and you see wrinkles forming in the surface of the blob as you push it, you have a set and can stop the boil.