Rhubarb Catch-Up

Summer has been so slow to get going, it seems the only thing growing out in the back yard is rhubarb.  Strangely, it's doing so well we can hardly use it all.  So to catch up, we made ketchup.

Rhubarb ketchup is a thing of great beauty.  It looks good, it tastes good, and it's a great way to use the big old fibrous stalks that you left too long to reasonably use in a pie...

Hot and Sour Rhubarb Ketchup

loosely adapted from Marguerite Patten's ketchup recipes

1-1/2 lb chopped rhubarb stalks
2 sweet white onions, diced
2 c water
1/2 c raw cane sugar + more to taste
3 cloves garlic, crushed
3 thai chili peppers, stemmed and split
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 c spiced vinegar (see below)

Combine the rhubarb, onion, water, sugar, garlic and hot peppers in a large sauce pan.  Bring to a boil.  Stir well to make sure all the sugar is dissolved, then turn down and simmer until the rhubarb and onions are soft.   

Puree the mixture with an immersion blender (or in batches in a regular blender, or run it through a food mill) and return to the stove.  Simmer until reduced to thick sauce.  

Stir in the fish sauce and spiced vinegar.  Taste it; add more sugar if needed or otherwise adjust your seasoning.  Simmer until desired ketchup-thickness.

Transfer to a clean jar or bottle and store in the refrigerator.   Alternatively, you can fill sterile jars with hot ketchup and heat process for 10 minutes, saving the fridge space.

Don't have cheesecloth around to tie those spices up in? Don't
worry.  Infuse the vinegar then strain them out.

Spiced Vinegar

2 c white vinegar (5% acetic acid)
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp whole cloves
1 tsp broken-up star anise
1 cinnamon stick

Put everything in a saucepan with a lid.  Heat over medium until it comes to a boil then remove from heat.  Leave, covered, for at least 2 hours to infuse the vinegar.  Strain through a sieve when you are ready to use.

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Marguerite Patten died recently, at the age of 99.  I can't help but figure she had something right about cooking and eating to have made that far.  

I didn't know anything about Patten before I met Fefe Noir and her ever-increasing collection of old British cookbooks.  What we have of Patten's (handed down from her mother and carefully protected in resealable bags so that the loose pages don't get lost) only scratches the surface of her bibliography, but they are well used -- as much for technique and inspiration as for actual recipes.  If nothing else, I owe her a great debt of gratitude for giving me permission to make ketchup out of things that aren't tomatoes.*

*I grew up in Heinz country.  Literally in the midst of tomato fields that fed the local factory which produced ketchup from 1910 until it closed in 2014.  I was reared on Heinz ketchup** so the idea that ketchup is made, always, from tomatoes was just woven into me.

**Well, okay, if we bought ketchup, it was Heinz, but mom did make her own ketchup.  From tomatoes.

This is what I love about Marguerite Patten: she is full of solutions.  I tore the kitchen apart looking for cheesecloth to tie all my spices in a bundle for simmering with the rhubarb.  As I was puzzling how I was going to get my spice mix infused through the ketchup I happen to notice that some of Patten's recipes used spiced vinegar, not a spice sachet.  Whoa-ho, then!  What a fantastic solution.  Infuse the vinegar and stir it in later.  Brilliant.

There is no recipe in her book for rhubarb ketchup, and certainly no recipe with thai chilies and star anise.  But she is very reliable about the proportions of fruit to sugar to vinegar.  So when we found ourselves with a glut of rhubarb (the opposite problem to what we faced a couple years ago), the obvious plan of attack was to pull the 500 Recipes: Jams, Pickles, Chutneys off the shelf.

~~~

Hot and sour rhubarb ketchup is fancy, but it's not snobby.  Served here with  grilled cheese made with sprouted grain sourdough bread from Rocket Bakery and smoked cheddar cheese from Five Brothers Artisan Cheese purchased at Admiral's Market.  Er, okay, maybe a little bit snobby...

Oh and by the way, you really want to make this ketchup.  Working on the recipe I knew we hit it when, tasting a batch, I immediately thought, "this would go really well with cava!".  Which means it would go really well with champagne... and there's your excuse to have champagne with your french fries.  The good news is that although you can serve it to your snobby friends, it's not really a snobby ketchup: also goes well with burgers and beer.   

Les Pommes de Terre & les Pommes de l'Arbre

In the continuing effort to make good use of the bounty of feral apples, we've made an apple ketchup.  Serendipitously, we've recently found some locally grown blue-right-through potatoes.  A match of epic greatness: blue potato oven fries with spicy apple ketchup.

Blue Potato Oven Fries

4 medium-smallish blue potatoes
2-3 tsp avocado oil*
1 tsp salt

*or use another oil with a high smoke point (like safflower or peanut)

Preheat oven to 450F.

Not just blue-skinned, these lovelies have a beautiful
purple-y-blue flesh as well.

Pour boiling water into a heat proof bowl large enough, but leaving room, for the potatoes.  Wash potatoes, leaving the skin on and cut into french-fry-sized sticks.  Drop the cut potatoes into hot water and let sit until edges are just softened (but not soft).  When the oven has reached temperature, drain potatoes and pat dry with a clean tea towel.  Rinse and dry the bowl (or get out a new one, but why make more dirty dishes than necessary?).  Place the potatoes in the bowl, drizzle with oil, sprinkle with salt and mix until fully covered.

Arrange on a baking tray lined with parchment paper in a single layer.  Turn oven down to 425F and bake for 22 minutes, turning after 12.  Total baking time will depend a bit on how thinly you sliced them, and the particular variety and age of potato used... so rely on your instincts as much as our guidance.  When they are done they will be cooked through and look browned and blistery.  Which is a long way of saying: when done, they will look like french fries.

Feral Apple Ketchup

Adapted from Marguerite Patten's 500 Recipes: Jams Pickles Chutneys


Use the pulp you put aside after making apple jelly:

After making apple jelly, run the contents of the cheesecloth
through a food mill to obtain apple pulp for this recipe.

for each 2 lbs apple pulp:
1 onion, chopped
2 large cloves garlic, chopped
2/3 c. malt vinegar
2-1/2 tbsp cider vinegar
1-1/4 tsp coarse salt
3/4 tsp pickling spice
1 tsp curry powder (the commercial americanized stuff will do, but bonus points for using your own)
1/2 tsp tumeric
1-2 dried hot chili peppers, crushed between fingers to release the seeds (we used gundu chilis, but any dried red chili will probably do)
3 oz. organic cane sugar
2 pint or 4 half-pint jars, sterilized

Put onion, garlic, vinegars, salt and spices into a heavy-bottomed saucepan.  Bring to a boil and cook at a slow boil until onion and garlic are soft.  Stir in apple pulp and return to a boil then remove from heat.

Working in batches, run the mixture through a food mill with the smallest-holed plate (or press through a sieve).  Return to heat and boil slowly until the desired consistency is reached.  Because the pulp has already had most of its liquid drained, it may be done almost as quickly as it reaches a boil.

Pour or ladle into sterilized jars and heat process for 10 minutes at sea level.  If you've made a small batch, skip the heat processing and store in the refrigerator.

~~~

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Lately we have fallen in love with the Adirondack Blue potato variety grown locally at Lester's Farm in St. John's, NL (if you're in the St. John's NL area, they also sell Adirondack Reds which also carry the colour through the flesh).  Admittedly, a good part of that love is superficial and entirely related to the beautiful purple-blue colour, but it's also a good potato: not too starchy, not mealy but not too wet.  We can attest that it's lovely boiled or roasted and it makes some of the best oven fries we've ever done.  That said, the success of the fries depends largely on using a an oil with a high smoke point: these are baked at 425F which is too high for olive or canola oil if that's what you're used to.  Splash out for avocado oil if you can (something too bitter for salad oil, by the way... which surprised us because avocados are delicious raw... but is a fantastic cooking oil).  We bought ours half-price when the nearby chain grocery was clearing it out (the bad news, we can't even buy it full priced there any more).

This whole pairing really started with the feral apples we've I've been picking compulsively.  Fefe Noir has been busy making dried apple rings and using the scraps from the apple rings and the apples too small for drying for making jelly.  Which leaves a great big mass of skins and seeds and stems and pulp.  There's a lot of goodness still in there which we didn't want to waste.  After running it through the food mill, the texture reminds me of extra-thick tamarind paste... so I told Fefe Noir she should make a samosa dipping sauce.  She looked at me.  You know that look? The one when someone's been all day in the kitchen, overheated from canning, then in all the excitement of preserves and jars and steam you innocently come up with a really good idea for more preserves and suggest it?  Oh yes, that's the look she gave me.  So I quietly milled the apples and put them in the freezer. (The remaining skins, seeds and stems fed our composter.)

The next morning, flipping through a recipe book over breakfast, I happened across instructions for apple ketchup.  Simply to prove I wasn't crazy thinking that the apple pulp would make a nice savoury sauce, I wrote a note that said "APPLE KETCHUP, p. 70!" before I left for work.  Instead of trying to convey the phone call I got later that morning, I will assume that you are smart enough to catch my error...

You will be glad to know, however, that I did step up and make some ketchup.  Yes, I got in the way in the kitchen, mucked up plans for an uneventful evening, and created general chaos.  But even Fefe will admit this ketchup was absolutely and completely worth the headache of it's manifestation.  I'm not sure it's the right thing for samosas, but apple ketchup will certainly elevate your french fries, burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches.