Given my abundance of apples, I decided that I had enough apples for both applesauce and apple butter. Applesauce is a simpler dish. Apple butter is cooked longer to make it thicker, cooked in apple juice or cider for extra flavor, and is heavily spiced. Here are the apples in the pot at the start of the cooking process.
Once the apples were soft, I ran them through the food mill to break them down and separate the peels. The milled apples were put back into the pot for more cooking.
Once everything was done I loaded it into jars and put them into the pressure canner. I have consumed one jar of applesauce which was delicious; the rest will last me through the dinner.
I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...



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