Category: 2.10 Preserves and syrups

When the hips start to colour on the bushes, and when there are enough, I make syrup. I’ll make several litres over the course of a few months because every last drop will be used.

Rosehip syrup is an amazing taste, add it to fizz for an instant cocktail, or cakes or cake-fillings. Use it on pancakes and drop scones, add it to herbal tea, use it as a cough syrup, or as a topping on ice-cream or poached fruit. As part of a salad dressing, to soak dried fruit before cooking in a couscous. I use it a lot.

Word of warning – I don’t use enough sugar for this to be a proper syrup – it won’t keep more than a few weeks in the fridge. I freeze it in batches then pour into sterile 250ml Kilner jars. Each jar is used inside a week.

Prep: 20min Cook: 10min Prep: 15min

This method is what you could call contingent – it depends on the amount of rosehips you’ve got.

1. Start by washing the rosehips, weigh them, then blitz them in enough water to make a thick soup.
2. Put them in a big pot and warm them to 60c, add 1/2tsp cinnamon and a pinch of fresh nutmeg per kg rosehips steeping them for 8min.
3. Drain and reserve the juice, add about 1/2 as much water again and steep the rosehips for another 8min at 60c.
4. Drain all the juice through muslin, and weight the juice. Divide this number by 7 then multiply by 3 – add that much sugar. I use golden sugar for a little bit of taste.
5. Gently warm the liquid until the sugar dissolves, then bottle or freeze.

Rosehips are a great source of vitamin C. But heating denatures it (it oxidises and becomes inactive), so lower temperatures help keep some of the vitamin C alive. If you steep at lower temperatures you keep even more, and you can even steep overnight at room temperature (make sure the bowl was sterilised beforehand. But the lower temperature and the lower sugar content means this is not pasteurised and will not act as a preserve (like jam). So be careful to use it quickly.

If you want a proper preserve then up the sugar content – at least 50:50 so equal weight of sugar to liquid. Adding a little citric acid will also help. But that’s way too sweet for me. I’d rather freeze it and use it quickly.

In the late Autumn I have a lot of fruit. It comes in waves, through the summer it’s the soft fruits, then the plums, then rosehips, damsons apples, pears, quince. A good orchard I have learned is one that has a long picking season for eating and a short one for brewing.

What I mean by that is that variety is key to a good orchard, or indeed to picking just 2 fruit trees for your garden. But whatever you do you will have a glut some years, and most years when the trees are mature. So what to do?

One of my favourite snacks is fruit leathers – they are small, tasty nibbles that give you energy. They are easy to take out on walks or for a quick burst of energy when you’re working. And they are easy… My two mainstays are plum and apple, but any fruit or mix will do.

Prep: 10min Cook: 12min Dry: 8hours

A few things to think about.

Firstly the sugar, you can use brown or golden, and or heat it in the pan to caramelise it first before adding the fruit. I add a little because I use cooking apples, but if I make this with dessert or eating apples I leave the sugar out entirely.

Second is the fruit. If I’m doing this with plums I leave the skins on but blitz them before cooking (so the bits of skin are tiny). If I don’t have enough of one fruit it will be a mix, apple and pear, apple and plum etc. They work well. If you’re no sure take a small piece of each fruit and eat them at the same time – if you like it then cook it. A taste test will also tell you if you need to add any sugar.

How dry? Well I tend to make my leathers so dry they crack when rolling, that’s so I can store them for months, taking me through (along with dried fruit) until the soft fruit starts.

Oh and our dig likes them too, so on a walk it can give them a boost if I’ve forgotten the snacks. And because they are low sugar they are pretty healthy. Remember fruit has plenty of sugar in it already. The good thing about leathers is you’re keeping the fibre and intensifying the taste.