Some rather gourmet Granitas

Originating in Sicily, a granita is rather like a coarse-grained sorbet. It works well as a light option for pudding, or an accompaniment to some fresh fruit in summer. It also makes a wonderful palate cleanser between courses, especially when you want to make an impact. 

There are various kinds of frozen dessert created in slightly different ways; for example, ice cream is made by freezing a dairy-based mixture, such as cream or custard, while it’s being either regularly stirred or churned to break up the ice-crystals as they are formed. This creates a smaller crystal and therefore a smooth, creamy-textured ice cream. Sorbet-making uses the same process, but the mixture is based on water or fruit juice. The base mixture of a granita is very similar to that of a sorbet, but the freezing process involves less stirring. This means that larger ice crystals are allowed to form, giving granita a coarser texture than sorbet. 

Don’t think that a coarse texture means an unsophisticated dessert, however. There is a huge scope for subtle flavour combinations in a granita, and it looks fantastic piled up in a martini or wine glass with a couple of appropriate garnishes. Including alcohol in your granita is not an absolute necessity, although I've done so in both of mine. However, it does stop the ice from setting too hard, creating a pleasingly slushy texture rather like a grown-up Slush Puppy; and of course, the fact that it’s frozen doesn’t stop it getting you tipsy...

Granita really is a fantastic opportunity to get creative with flavours, so without further ado, here are a couple of suggestions to get you started.

Apple and Mint Granita

Lovely for summer (spring’s just around the corner folks!)

Ingredients

1 litre of apple juice, preferably unsweetened and not from concentrate

A few sprigs of mint

A couple of cooking apples

A squeeze of lemon or lime

200g sugar

A dash of calvados or apple vodka (optional)

Method

Chop up, peel and deseed the apples and cook them with 100g of the sugar and a little water until they are very tender or falling apart. If necessary, blend them until they’re sufficiently mushy. Leave to cool. 

Meanwhile, put the apple juice, mint and the rest of the sugar in a large pan with some lemon juice and your choice of alcohol if using. Bring slowly to the boil, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Leave to cool to room temperature so that the mint infuses, then sieve or pick out the mint stems and add the apple pulp.

Put the resulting mixture in the freezer (you can use the pan you boiled it in as long as it’s freezer-safe) and allow it to freeze, stirring every 20 minutes or so. You won’t need to stir so often if you’ve included alcohol, and the granita may take longer to freeze.

Before serving, fluff the granita up with the tines of a fork so that the ice crystals are of a roughly even size. Serve in a martini glass with a sprig of mint and perhaps a twist of apple or a couple of raspberries.

Mulled Wine Granita

This is a very easy recipe I did as a palate-cleanser on Christmas Day. It also makes a great light dessert. 

Ingredients

1 bottle of red wine

1 orange

1 lemon or lime

1 cinnamon stick

2 star anise

4 cloves

135g granulated sugar

125ml water

Method

Zest and juice all the citrus fruit. Put the wine in a large pan and add all the other ingredients. Gently heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Bring very briefly to the boil (take the pan off the heat as soon as it starts to bubble). Then put the pan aside for the spices to infuse, and leave it until it’s cool. 

Pour the wine through a sieve into a freezer-friendly container and pop it in your freezer. If the pan you boiled it in is ok to freeze you can use that. You need to leave it until set – for at least six hours, depending on your freezer. Give it a stir every one or two hours if you can. It will set eventually, but not particularly hard, as the alcohol stops it from freezing solid. 

Serve in a glass, decorated with a cinnamon stick if you've got enough. You could also use a twist of orange, a couple of skinned segments, or even a star anise of two (but don't let your guests bite into them!). This granita also looks very striking served over a scoop of vanilla ice cream, although I can't say that the flavour combination is everyone's cup of tea...

So that was granita. Remember to experiment, and Happy Freezing!

‘Tis the season to be jelly...

Welcome back!

Hello all, and a hearty winter welcome back to Please Don’t Kiss the Cook! Apologies for the lengthy break: the combined Basic Cuisine and Patisserie certificates at Le Cordon Bleu took up rather too much time to leave any over for writing. However, I’m now a Cuisine-only bird (albeit a bird who rather misses her weekly cake) and have a whole two days a week going spare. 

On a much duller note, I should point out for copyright reasons that this blog is in no way affiliated with Le Cordon Bleu, nor are the posts based on any material given to me by the school as part of the course. Sorry folks, if you want the Cordon Bleu experience you’ll have to go there yourself.

Jelly time

Around this time last year, I wrote a brief couple of paragraphs about a Leftover Jelly I’d seen on River Cottage. Well, its (just coming to the end of) jelly season again, and I’d like to celebrate that by giving you another couple of jelly recipes which I’ve used this year. Both are apple-based, as befits an autumn jelly, but in summer you can use a similar method to make jellies from redcurrants and blackcurrants too. 

The apple season in the UK varies depending on the type of apple, but if you’re lucky enough to have an orchard with a few different varieties of tree you can swing it so that you have a supply right from mid-September through to January or February. Picking and eating seasons can be separate for each different variety, so that you might pick an apple in September, store it individually wrapped in a cool, dry place, and eat it in October. 

October, as it happens, was just when I sneaked home from the Big Smoke for a little two-week break to find the orchard stuffed with plums and apples and the vegetable patch overflowing with mint. I whipped up some mint and apple jelly on the spot, slaved over pots and pots of plum jam, and nabbed some crab-apples to take back to London for my absolute favourite, crab-apple jelly.

The basic premise of any jam or jelly is always the same: boil fruit with sugar to set and preserve it. The setting bit requires pectin, which is naturally present in all fruit to a greater or lesser degree: the preserving is achieved by the high sugar levels which discourage the growth of bacteria. Jelly differs from jam in that it does not contain whole pieces of fruit, but rather the juice obtained from boiling fruit and straining it through a muslin bag. 

If your interest in jelly has reached such mammoth proportions that you are not satisfied with the above information, may I suggest that you pick over the wealth of knowledge available elsewhere on the internetzzz. Just Google ‘jelly’. Or ‘jam’. Or (God forbid!) both...

Recipes

Mint and Apple Jelly

Ingredients

2kg apples

170ml white wine vinegar

Large bunch of mint

Sugar (the amount will depend on the amount of juice yielded)

Possibly a bit of water

Method

Chop the apples into quarters and pop them in a large pan with the vinegar and about 2/3 of the mint. Boil (not too hard) until the apples cook down to a pulp. You don’t need to peel or core the apples because you’re draining out the juice later; in fact, there’s some useful pectin in the skin and seeds. If the mixture tries to stick to the bottom, you can add a little extra water to get it started. Once the apples begin to cook they should also release some moisture of their own.

Once the apple is very soft and mushy, scoop the whole lot into a muslin bag and hang it up over a bowl to catch all the juice which comes out. If you don’t have a bag or any muslin, you can use a clean tea towel. Just tie it firmly into a bag shape full of pulp, then hang it off something (one particular cupboard handle in my flat works well) over the bowl. DON’T squeeze the bag, however tempted you get, but you can put a small plate and a weight on top of the pulp to help press the juice through. It’s best left overnight to drip.

Once you have all the juice you think you’re going to get, measure it out into a jug and weigh out 450g of sugar for every 570ml of juice. Warm the sugar gently in a low oven, or the top left of an Aga. At the same time, pop a couple of small plates in the fridge, and sterilise some jam jars. Either leave them in the low oven with the sugar, or pop them in a saucepan with some cold water and bring them to the boil, then leave to cool IN A WARM PLACE – if their temperature changes too quickly, they will shatter. Also note that the jars must still be warm when you pour in the hot jam, as the same principle applies and a pair of legs covered in boiling jam and broken glass often offends.

Put the juice and sugar into a high-sided, thick-bottomed pan and heat gently, stirring, until all the sugar has dissolved. Then bring the resulting syrup to the boil. 

This is the tricky bit. You want to boil the sugar and juice until it comes to setting point – that is, until the sugar’s reached the right temperature and it will set into a lovely clear jelly texture when it cools. Too low a temperature and it will be runny; too high, and the jelly will be all gummy and sticky instead of light and delicious. You can do this with a sugar thermometer, in which case it’s fairly easy – either your own thermometer will tell you the right point, or you need what is known as ‘soft thread’ stage, which is around 105-108°C. 

If you don’t have a sugar thermometer, there are two ways of determining setting point, both of which involve those small plates you left in the fridge earlier. Remember those? Right. Get one out and leave the other in there. For both methods you need to take a little of the boiling sugar syrup from the pan and pop it in a blob on the plate. Then you can either wait a minute for it to cool and push the edge of the blob with a finger, or you can pick a bit up on your fingertip and pinch it between finger and thumb. In the former case, the jelly is ready when a little skin is formed on the cooling blob and it wrinkles up when you push it with a finger. In the latter case, it’s ready when a small thread forms as you gently part finger and thumb. It’ll only get to a few millimetres before it breaks, but this indicates the soft thread stage you are looking for. Fabby. 

Now it’s time for your warm jam jars; pour the syrup in right to the top if you can, and (CAREFULLY, it is HOT) screw or clip on the lids. Still being careful (it’s STILL hot), quickly invert each jar so the hot syrup sterilises the lid, then turn back the right way up and leave to cool. If you’re using wax discs instead of lids you can’t do this, so just pour in the jam, secure the wax disc, and cross your fingers. 

Finally, gorge unashamedly on roast lamb and homemade mint and apple jelly.

Crabapple Jelly

Ingredients

1.8kg crabapples

1 litre water

Sugar (the amount will depend on the amount of juice yielded)

Method

Halve all the crabapples.

Congratulations, that was the hard bit. Now boil them in the water until they are mushy, spoon them into a jelly bag or muslin (see above for extra advice). Leave overnight hanging over a bowl for the juice to drip out. Weight out 450g sugar for every 570ml juice. Warm until the sugar dissolves, then boil until setting point (see above) and pour into warm, sterilised jam jars (see above...are we sensing a trend here?). Screw on lids, invert, turn back upright, and leave to cool.

Crabapple jelly is a bit like a lighter, more subtle version of redcurrant, and goes excellently with roast lamb or pork, or with bread and cheese as a light lunch. I think it’s seriously under-rated, and I hope you agree with me.