Tag: jam

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The Taste Test: Raspberry Jam

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Well, I chose raspberry jam, because that’s my favourite jam. ‘That’s everyone’s favourite jam’, said James, but I don’t think that’s true? I feel like quite a lot of people would say strawberry? Anyway, me being me, my actual favourite jam is probably some obscure homemade artisan Morello cherry and Cognac monstrosity that I haven’t even tried yet, but certainly my favourite day-to-day jam is raspberry. It’s lovely on croissants. It’s excellent with peanut butter. Pop it in-between some cakes and you’ve got yourself a party.

Also, obviously I went for jam with seeds because I don’t get seedless jam. Just why?

As before, I feel I need a rambling disclaimer: obviously, I am doing this in my kitchen and not in a lab and I am not a scientist. These are the opinions of one person – that said, one person who has been trained to taste for quality. Also, the products used in this series are just examples – obviously each supermarket has, say, eight or nine different types of jam or whatever the product may be, and I’m not going to try every single one because what am I, made of money?

Finally, I should highlight that I tasted all the products blind, and at the time of tasting and making my notes I didn’t know which product came from which shop. I sat in one room while my glamorous assistant (er, my husband), prepared the samples in another. Any notes added regarding packaging and so on were only done after blind tasting, when I learned which who had made product A, B, C, D, or E.

The Blind Taste Test: Raspberry Jam

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Raspberry Jam
per 100g
£
kcal
fat
carb
fibre
protein
salt
Sainsbury’s Organic
0.44
248
0.5
59
2.1
0.8
0.05
St Dalfour
0.77
237
0.8
56
2
0.5
0.02
Bonne Maman
0.50
239
0.2
57
3.4
0.7
Waitrose
0.52
247
0.6
58.8
2.2
0.6
0.13
Grandessa Aldi
0.13
244
0.5
61
0.5
0.5
0.05
Tesco
0.17
262
0.5
63
1.9
0.4
0.2

A – St Dalfour – 6/10

  • Firm, holds its shape well on the spoon. Very, very seedy. I like seeds but this might be a bit much for me – it’s like a seed paste. Good balance of sharpness and sweetness, and decent raspberry flavour.

B – Waitrose – 7/10

  • Smoother and less seedy than A. Sharper too, with more of a raspberry flavour than A. Tastes naturally fruity – very enjoyable.

C – Grandessa Aldi – 6/10

  • Much less structure, running off the spoon, very loose. Very sweet – a bit too sweet for my palate. Not a bad flavour though. Would probably be nicer on toast with the neutral bread to balance the sweetness.

D – Bonne Maman – 8/10

  • Dark, rich, and thick, holds shape well. Substantial. Not too sweet, a great balance. Full on raspberry flavour.

E – Tesco – 3/10

  • Holding shape well, not running everywhere. Much lighter in colour than some of the other samples. Tastes a bit artificial and cloying with sweetness – like raw jelly cubes – with an odd texture and aftertaste.

F – Sainsbury’s – 5/10

  • Fine, but nothing special, and again a bit too sweet. Another one with an odd texture.

Conclusions

Well, here we have a Taste Test where the fancy, pricier brands won out. I guess it makes sense here, in a way: more expensive product = higher fruit content and less bulking out with cheap sugar. Most of these would be fine for casual toast-consumption, but if you want to go for something a bit special, for an event cake for example, then I wouldn’t kick that Bonne Maman stuff out of bed, and the Waitrose one was nice too. Neither were actually the most expensive either, which is an unexpected bonus.

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Leiths: Advanced Term, Week 4

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I began Week 4 in a bit of a haze, due to a heady weekend cocktail of seeing Derren Brown live, May Day celebrations in Oxford, and an ecstatic, unexpected, unplanned evening at Bellowhead’s last-ever gig. I proudly wore my Bellowhead Farewell Tour t-shirt to school on Tuesday, and since no one there seems to know who Bellowhead are (or were), it meant nothing to anybody but me, and I was reminded again of the vast gulf between my school life and my home life. Different priorities, different cities, different people, different me.

Our Monday morning session was a gentle one in which we produced a salmon mousseline to be quenelled and poached in a Thai-style fish broth. I was a bit unsure about the mousseline, because I adore salmon and sort of hated the idea of blending it to death, pushing it through a sieve, and beating it with cream before faffing about quenelling and poaching it. Well, I should really stop being so suspicious, because the dish was lovely (although I am terrible at quenelling and, by and large, would still prefer to pan-fry a salmon fillet whole).

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I wasn’t massively looking forward to the afternoon session on spirits and liqueurs (see opening paragraph regarding weekend of excess), but our presenter was the charming Peter Wilson, who quickly won me over by cleverly peppering his slides with pictures of his adorable dog. Unfortunately, even cute dog pictures couldn’t bring me round to liking whiskey, but the session was very interesting nonetheless. Did you know that according to EU regulations, rum cannot be flavoured, and thus spiced rum is not technically rum but a liqueur instead?! I did not know this and as we have ‘spiced rum’ at home all the time (it’s James’s favourite pre-show sharpener) it blew my mind quite seriously.

We were visited by a Professor of Molecular Gastronomy on Wednesday. Peter Barnham, scientist, food fanatic, and penguin lover, came to talk us through some of the technical explanations of why certain elements of cooking work as they do. We got to eat ice cream made in seconds with liquid nitrogen, watched a lightbulb exploding in a microwave, and learned why salting water for cooking green vegetables is absolutely pointless. It was a fascinating morning, and we only began to very gently graze the surface of this huge and complex subject.

We were a little worried about the afternoon cooking session, as the morning group ran over by at least forty five minutes and left the kitchens looking mildly traumatised. It was a busy prep day that involved a lot of cleaning and sterilising of work surfaces in between making puff pastry from scratch and boning, stuffing and rolling a chicken for a ballotine, as well as finishing off two loaves of walnut and raisin bread. Making puff pastry feels almost routine by this point, but making chicken ballotine is, frankly, kind of a hassle and not an experience I am keen to replicate in my own kitchen.

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Thursday was a double dem day. We started with preserving fruit in the morning with Michael, which gave us an excellent excuse to eat scones with raspberry jam, marmalade on sourdough toast, and quince paste with cheese. There is definitely an art to making jams, conserves, and jellies, and my tried and true ‘bung it all in a pan and boil it to death’ method probably isn’t going to work out too well for me at school. In the afternoon, Hannah expertly steered us through the buttery seas of croissant and Danish creation. Everything she made was glorious and it was easy to delude myself into thinking I could get similar results. Did you know that it takes three days to make croissants from scratch the proper, traditional way? Again, I am pretty glad they make us do it at school, because I simply don’t have the time or patience to do it at home myself. Also, I have pretty effectively convinced myself that all the butter I eat at school doesn’t count, somehow.

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Friday was an all-day cooking session, and also our last day with our lovely class teacher Heli (sob), as she is off on maternity leave. We began with the seafood feuilletées, one of which is pictured at the top of this page. We saw them in a dem and have made them ourselves, and yet I still have no idea how to pronounce the word feuilletée. Luckily for me, this is a blog, so I don’t have to be able to pronounce it – ha! A victory for ignorance. Anyway, they were puff pastry cases filled with a chervil beurre blanc, samphire, salmon, prawns, and lemon sole, served with more seafood and topped, in my case, with crispy salmon skin. They also had to be very precisely measured. Heli told us that the cut pastry had to be 1.2cm thick, and she literally and genuinely came up to my table, got my ruler, and got down to eye-level with my pastry to determine that it looked ‘a bit more like 1.3cm than 1.2cm’ thick. Advanced term, people. Anyway, my very precisely measured feuilletée made a delicious lunch.

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In the afternoon we served our chicken ballotines filled with a dark meat, porcini, and thyme stuffing, with spring greens, chicken and thyme jus, and the potato accompaniment of our choice – I went with dauphine potatoes, which are a mixture of mashed potato, choux pastry, and cheese mixed together and deep fried. Sounds delicious, right? Not going to lie, they were completely lovely and I ate all five pictured on the plate very soon after service. Sadly my ballotine skills need a lot of work but, as mentioned above, ballotining is not my favourite pastime.

And thus ends Week 4. Coming up in Week 5 (this is like a bad TV show trailer now), croissants, sweetbreads, tortellini, and oysters, amongst other things. See you there.

 

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Cherry and Almond Cupcakes

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For me, the best part of a new school year was always just before it actually started. As a child, I loved buying new matching sets of multi-coloured stationery, writing my name carefully in block capitals on the spines of folders, and going on excursions to choose a new backpack. As a teenager, I’d always vow that this was the year I would keep all of my work in neat, chronological order, always start my homework the night I was assigned it rather than the night before it was due in, and somehow start having good hair. As a young adult, during the summer before I started university, I dutifully purchased all of the books on our sickeningly long reading list, with real and honest intentions of reading them before term started. Everything was always so full of promise.

To be honest, the best part was usually shopping for new things. It tended to go downhill after that.

The problem was that I always assumed that I could fundamentally change somehow. I knew that this year things would be different, and better, because I would be different, and better. The purchasing of new studying aids – be they pretty stationery or stacks of crisp new books – always represented a new beginning. It was a chance to wipe the slate clean. The gift of infinite possibility. The opportunity to be perfect. After all, I had the perfect pack of rainbow Sharpies – surely there couldn’t be much more to it than that?

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Of course, I was never actually perfect, so always fell short of my own expectations. After a few days, weeks, or even months, my carefully structured timetables would always start to crumble, my reading plans would get neglected in favour of dossing about in the kitchen, and my notes would slide from neat cursive into a slapdash scrawl. It was always so much harder in reality than it had been in my imagination. And somehow, I never learned my lesson, and began each new term and each new year with boundless optimism, only to be crushed again by my own mediocrity. Or perhaps ‘mediocrity’ isn’t fair: I was normal, imperfect, and human. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I swore to anyone who would listen that I had finished, that I was done with studying, and that I would never change my mind, forever and ever, amen.

And now here I am, looking to buy a new backpack.

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Yes, I know, I did a cupcake post mere days ago. I’m afraid there are many more where that came from too. What can I say? Cupcakes are quick to bake, easy to transport, customisable, and pretty. I make them a lot.

They have absolutely no connection to the ramble at the beginning of this post, except in that they are also ‘new beginnings’ cupcakes. I made them at the request of a lovely friend of mine who has just had a beautiful baby daughter.

Notes: I didn’t want to make a cherry and almond cupcake with weak flavours: I think cherry and almond are a great combination and so I have done my best to make each flavour bold and distinct.

You can’t really tell from the pictures, but the frosting here is actually two different colours swirled together. Part of the reason you can’t see this is because of the light when I was taking the photos, but part of it is that the colours weren’t massively distinctive because I wanted to create them naturally. If you want something bolder, add some red food colouring to your cherry buttercream.

Ingredients:

for the cakes

150g butter
150g caster sugar
100g self-raising flour
3 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
60g ground almonds
1 tbsp milk
jar of cherry jam

for the frosting

100g butter, softened
200g icing sugar
4 tbsp cherry jam
1 tsp vanilla bean paste
1 tsp almond extract

12 cherries
toasted flaked almonds

Method:

  1. Heat your oven to 180C/ 160C fan/ gas 4 and put paper cases in a twelve hole muffin tin. Cream the butter and sugar together in a large bowl with an electric whisk until light and fluffy. Add the flour, eggs, baking powder, ground almonds, and milk, and blitz until smooth. Scoop the mixture into your cases and bake for about 15 minutes, or until they are golden and risen. Leave to cool.
  2. When your cupcakes are cold, core them and pop about a teaspoon of cherry jam into the centre of each cake. Eat the cores. This is compulsory.
  3. For the frosting, beat the butter until soft and smooth. Sift the icing sugar and mix it in roughly with a spatula, then beat with an electric mixer until smooth and fluffy. Divide the mixture in half. Flavour half with the cherry jam (add food colouring for a brighter colour), and half with the vanilla bean paste and almond extract. Fit a piping bag with a star nozzle. Push the cherry buttercream against one side of the bag and the almond against the opposite side, and then pipe the frosting onto the cupcakes.
  4. Top with a cherry and flaked almonds.

Perfect for taking in to school as a bribe.

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