Pesto presto

Summer is gone but I will have Pesto for months.

There isn't much to say because there is an excellent recipe over here.

I can add a couple of notes:

1. Use flowers as well as leaves

2. Use less cheese

3. Use pecans instead of pine nuts

4. Cover Pesto with a layer of olive oil

5. Use a food processor. Life's too short to be a purist

Eat it in sandwiches

Put it in pasta (but not with cream)

Put a Fig Leaf On That

I've mentioned my wonderful back-yard fig tree several times on this blog. Conditions this year have been slightly wetter than perfect. Nevertheless, my total harvest was about 45kg over the space of 8 weeks. 

I was ready this time for the glut of fruit. The breakdown was something like:

15kg fruit leather

10kg dried in halves in the dehydrator

8kg canned in heavy syrup (as I have written about previously)

5kg fresh fruit given away

5kg fresh fruit eaten at home

2kg dried whole in the sun (and briefly boiled in seawater)

While I was putting a bird net over the tree in early summer, I was forced to trim some branches. That meant taking some branches which already had a bunch of green figs on them. Instead of discarding them, I pickled them using a similar method to Stephanie Alexander's pickled watermelon rind recipe. 

Whole sun-dried fruit was an interesting and successful experiment. Finishing them in seawater gave them an incredible umami edge (and probably helped to make them less attractive to bugs and microbes). Sun drying takes much longer than using the dehydrator and is fraught with danger of rotting, being eaten, getting rained on, you name it. It is, however, completely free, although I would recommend investing in an insect net, or at least a bird screen. There are excellent instructions with photographs here (fignut.com) and I don't have anything to add other than to recommend it.

The only other method that required some preparation was the fruit leather. I was so pleased with the results that most of the fruit went to this method. 

The lemon juice seems like a high proportion, but the acid serves two purposes: It retains a much better colour in the resulting product, and it enhances the flavour of the product greatly. That said, I might try substituting, in whole or in part, tartaric acid. Using a dry acid like tartaric acid would result in a faster drying process. Tartaric acid also has a more neutral flavour, avoiding a strong lemon flavour in the product.

For each batch, I used approximately:

1.5kg fig pulp

200ml lemon juice

pinch salt

Basically, cut of the stalk of the fruit, mash and mix, then dry.

I tried using a food processor to process the fruit, but found that the leather developed deep cracks as it dried. A mouli was only a little more effort but produced a much better leather. I think this was because the mouli left longer fibres that bound the sheet together better.

I use a harvest maid dehydrator that I picked up at a flea market (it doesn't look like they are a going concern, but EziDry and Vacola products look like they have similar heritage). I have 4 solid inserts specifically for drying runny materials like this. Brush a little oil on the insert to help release the leather after drying. 

Each sheet takes about 300g of pulp mix and dries to about 150g of final product. Drying time can vary by several hours depending on ambient humidity, but, in general, each batch takes about 12 hours at 45 degrees. Any leftover pulp mix can be refrigerated for a couple of days and dried later.

I roll the finished leather in a sheet of baking paper, secure each roll with a rubber band and store in an airtight container. It's mid-May as I write, we have gone through about half of the leather and they are perfectly preserved.

How to eat - just eat em as a snack. They're great!