There’s nothing new under the sun in the food world and this technique as applied to fruit preserves is probably in use somewhere. For all I know, this might be a common technique in jam making, which I know little about. If you know of a recipe like this that starts by adding fruit to hot caramel, please point me to it so I can research it further.

The key idea is to minimize the cooking time to retain the fresh fruit flavors and aromas. Start with no added liquid other than honey and maple syrup cooked down until it’s a caramel. Adding fruit to this intensely hot syrup causes the fruit to pop quickly and give up its juices fast. The small amount of juice produced is the only liquid that needs to cook off.

This recipe yields a chunky sauce of thick consistency with cranberries that still pop between the teeth, and apples that stil have some texture. If you like a less chunky sauce, I have some suggestions after the recipe.

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Fresh n’ Fruity Cranberry Chutney
©2004 Professor Salt

Yield: roughly 1/2 quart (all measurements in US units)

Ingredients:
One 12 oz. bag fresh cranberries
1 medium sized apple – I used a Fuji
1/4 cup maple syrup - I like the dark and strongly flavored US grade B
1/4 cup honey
freshly grated zest of 1 lemon
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch of salt

Optional:
Black pepper, a few grinds, to taste
Ground cardomom, to taste
Grand Marnier, a splash to add flavor, but not enough to booze it up.
Maple syrup, to taste

1. Rinse cranberries in a bowl of water. Discard stems and spoiled berries. Drain berries in a colander.
2. Core and chop apple, with skin on, into small pieces about the same size as cranberries
3. Mix maple syrup and honey in a 3 quart saucepot with a heavy clad bottom, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
4. Reduce the syrup and measure it with a candy thermometer until it reaches hard crack stage, 300 degrees Farenheit.
5. Quickly add cranberries.
6. Stir fruit with a heat resistant silicone spatula or wooden spoon constantly for 2 minutes. Scrape syrup off the bottom of pot, and coat all of the fruit with the syrup.
7. Add the apples, and stir again to coat.
8. Reduce heat to low, and allow the fruit to seep out its juices.
9. Cook uncovered for 20 minutes or until the juices have evaporated and/or absorbed into the sauce. Stir every few minutes during cooking. Time will vary depending on how juicy the fruit started out.
10. Remove pot from heat, and dip the pot into a sinkful of cool water to bring contents quickly to room temperature.
11. Add salt, pepper, lemon zest, and optional ingredients like vanillla, Grand Marnier, or spices, and taste.
12. If more sweetener is desired, drizzle maple syrup and meditate until nirvana is achieved.
13. Transfer cooled sauce into a sealed container, and store in refrigerator.

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NOTE: Sugar burns are extremely painful. DO NOT touch or taste the syrup no matter how tempting it looks. Use a larger pot than you think you need (I used a 3 quart saucier) because the syrup foams up alot. Overspilled sugar will wreak havoc on your stovetop. Ask me how I know.

Maple and honey start boiling. Its water content is still high at this point. Pay attention to its color and the size of bubbles as it cooks off.

240F, “soft ball” stage. Individual bubbles are fairly large, and color has darkened.

300F, “hard crack” stage. I’m a jackass and dropped the thermometer. Tiny bubbles form a tall foam.

Cranberries start popping immdiately. Stir well to coat evenly.

Apples go in a minute later. Notice the amount of juice already given off.

Sorry, I didn’t take a photo of the final product. Use the Force to know when it’s done, you will.

This is a tart, almost chutney-like sauce because the honey and maple syrup have caramelized enough that it loses its sugary character and takes on a darkly roasted caramel flavor. The variety of apple will also affect its sweetness. If you want yours sweeter, add additional maple syrup after the sauce has cooled to room temperature.

If you like a less chunky sauce where all the cranberry skins have popped, try one of these options:

1) Cover the pot while it cooks to retain liquid, and increase your cooking time to 30 minutes or slightly more. The additional time will help break down the cranberry skins until they’ve all popped.
or
2) Cook the sauce uncovered per the instructions, then run the room temperature product briefly through a food processor.

If you try this technique, please come back and comment. I’m still dialing it in and I’d appreciate your feedback.

My Japanese family emigrated to New York in 1973 blissfully unaware of Thanksgiving, cranberry sauce, or turkey induced food comas. I have my second grade teacher to thank for introducing me to all that, and seeding a love for cooking on the one day Americans celebrate clueless FOB immigrants.

I was seven years old. Ms. Shapiro was a pretty first year teacher fresh out of grad school (ahem…schoolboycrush). It was 1975, and she let us play the Bay City Rollers on the record player and dance like goons if we were good. She taught us about holidays through food traditions and having us kids cook in class. We formed wontons on Chinese New Year for instance, and she did the frying. Being the only Asian kid in my school (except for my sister), I already knew how to use chopsticks and helped her show the other kids how (ugghahem…teacherspet).

On Thanksgiving, we made cranberry sauce in class. Hers is the classicly simple recipe: berries, apples, sugar, water, orange juice and zest simmered for a couple hours until thickened. I’ve made cranberry sauce every Thanksgiving since. The jellied gloop still shaped like a can has never fouled my parents’ holiday meal out of sheer ignorance of the stuff. I think of Ms. Shapiro every November and often thought I should track her down to say thanks for imbuing an early love of food and cooking. Two years ago, I did exactly that and we’ve since been in touch via email.

She confessed that she spilled those cranberries all over the floor while she was prepping the recipe. We kids were in another classroom at the time so we didn’t see her having to chase them all over the room, under the desks, before we could cook. Mmm… dust bunnies. I also learned she got her recipe from her mom. So this tradition goes back a ways.

I admit that after nearly three decades of making this sauce, the magic wasn’t there for me. I didn’t need B.B. King to tell me the thrill was gone. I tweaked the basic recipe every year by adding spices, wine, or Grand Marnier. I tried using maple syrup or honey instead of white sugar for added flavor. And I realized that was the whole problem: I was adding other flavors to make up for a lack of fresh berry and apple flavors. Why the lack of fresh fruit flavors? Because I was simmering the sauce for two hours and all the volatile aromas and flavors had long since cooked off. Why did I need to cook it for two hours? Because it started off with too much liquid. Why, why, why? Because that’s the way our mamas did it and we don’t screw with tradition, that’s why.

In my next post, I’ll share a technique I came up with last year for a fresh tasting, quick cooking cranberry sauce.

We got skunked on the Colorado elk hunt this season, but Gurlfren’s dad sent us home with several packages of frozen meat from last year’s hunt. I’d never eaten elk before, much less cooked it, so the process of figuring out how to prepare it was a fun challenge.

These medallions were marked backstrap meat. Hmm… what’s that? A little internet research reveals it’s from the loin of the animal, what we’d anthropomorphically call its lower back. Check. So it’s a tender muscle that can be cooked quickly over high heat. Right. Now what?

The butcher trimmed these raw crimson medallions a bit less than 2 inches thick, and sliced a pocket into it suitable for a stuffing. Backstrap meat has very little external fat and no marbling, and barely any connective tissue: very much like a beef filet mignon. Really lean meat.

So how do I approach this? That pocket called for a big wad of herb butter made with finely minced parsley and sage from my garden. As the steak cooked, the butter melted gently and infused the lean meat with herbs. I crusted the outside of the steak with cracked black pepper & salt, seared quickly in a hot pan for a couple minutes on each side, then tossed the pan in a 400 degree oven to roast for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, I started a couscous for the starch component of the meal. Finely dice carrots & celery and add them to boiling chicken broth, and let simmer until tender, about 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, add the couscous, cover and let it sit for ten minutes to steam. Easy.

Does elk steak need a sauce? It couldn’t hurt. We brought back a locally made Colorado wine made from sour cherries. It tastes like a barely sweetened cherry pie filling, with a big fruity nose and a bitter / tart cherry flavor. When I first tasted it, I immediately thought it will make a great sauce, and it did. To add more dimension to the sauce, I bought some frozen sour cherries at my local Persian supermarket.

I pulled out the medium-rare steaks from the oven and rested them on a warm casserole while I prepared a sauce using the same pan. I deglazed the pan with chicken stock, and reduced about a cup of it to a syrup consistency. I then added roughly a cup of cherry wine and the thawed, pitted cherries and reduced again to a thick glaze. Season to taste at the end. Simple, and not overwrought.

While the cherry sauce reduced I started a sage brown butter on another burner. Melt butter over a low-medium heat, add whole fresh sage leaves until the milk solids turn brown and the sage crisps nicely. Drain off the butter and sage leaves, and reserve it. To this pan, I threw in sugar snap peas and parboiled fresh fava beans (also from the Persian market), and sauteed over medium high heat. Season with salt and pepper, and add back the browned butter at the very end as a sauce.

Verdict: elk is delicious, and not at all gamey as I expected. It’s almost like beef with a firmer texture and a slightly stronger flavor. Considering the distances these large animals migrate in the wilderness, that makes perfect sense.

Sorry I didn’t keep track of the ingredients, so no recipe for this one. For me, half the fun of cooking is envisioning the final outcome and improvising a way to get there. For the next session of You Kilt It, Now Eat It, we tackle a frozen lump of elk roast and try not to screw that up too much.

I found green almonds for sale this week at Irvine’s Wholesome Choice, a great Persian owned supermarket with an excellent produce section. Not as extensive and exotic as the Berkeley Bowl or Austin’s Central Market, but far better than most in Orange County. If you want to play the “my supermarket can beat up your supermarket” game, we’ll have to step outside…

Having started phase one of the South Beach diet after last weekend’s carb orgy at the Songkran festival, Wholesome Choice provided all the veggies we’ve been eating this week at the Salt household. In addition to the stores in our area that serve the Persian and Arab populations, I suspect you’ll find green almonds for a few more weeks at the better farmer’s markets around these parts. Here’s a link to farmer’s markets in the Los Angeles area, courtesy of the LA Times (free registration required).

The Persian recipes I’ve seen for green almonds have included fruit and or sugars, so I’m afraid those are out. Perhaps I’ll simply boil them and sautee with oil, garlic, and parsley, or something along those lines. To be truthful, I bought these cool looking, fuzzy little critters without knowing exactly what to do with them, but who’s not guilty of that every now and then? If you have any carb-free recipes, please leave me a note.

[Update: Regina Schrambling wrote this story for the LA Times about almonds, and talks about San Francisco chef’s Judy Rodgers role in popularizing green almonds. Free registration to the LA Times is required.]

Wholesome Choice
18040 Culver Dr
Irvine, CA
949-551-4111