Blackcurrant extravaganza

Hand of a true berry-lover

We started last week with a visit to a local blackcurrant orchard where the owners were generously letting anyone come and pick as much fruit as they wanted from young plants...for free! We found row after row of heavily laden bushes, all calling to us with promises of jams, cakes, pies, and other delights. Susie, Sean and I were having such a good time picking the beautiful fruit that we got slightly carried away and arrived home with close to 40 pounds of these ripe, sweet-tart berries.


The first step was sorting through all the berries, removing errant stems, leaves, and other such bracken. It took much of the afternoon and by the end everyone and everything in the kitchen was looking slightly purple.


Susie made several huge batches of jam, each time loading the biggest pot available with ten pounds of fruit and a matching ten pounds of sugar. Bedtime saw us with a few dozen jars filled and sealed, a supply sufficient to last the household well into next year's blackcurrant season.



There were about six pounds of berries that didn't make it into the jam process and were instead frozen for future use. A few days later, I was flipping through the River Cottage cookbook (by an English chef/promoter of local, seasonal eating) and I found a recipe for Double Ripple Blackcurrant Ice Cream. Naturally, I couldn't resist. As luck would have it, Kevin was milking the neighbor's cow for the week and was coming home every other day with eight liters of fresh milk and two liters of cream. Most of the milk was being transformed into cheese and the cream into butter, but I put my claim on a bit for dessert.

The ingredients couldn't have been fresher: blackcurrants we picked, milk from the goats outside, cream from the cow down the road and eggs from the neighbor.

The bowl on the left holds the blackcurrants, cooked with a little sugar and strained through mesh to make a thick puree. In the middle is a mixture of sugar and egg yolks, no color added! Farm fresh eggs really are that color :) The finished product looked a lot like the picture in the book, though maybe slightly less smooth because I didn't have an ice cream maker, just a freezer and a whisk.

Afterward I was feeling inspired to make more goodies, so I started on the Dark Chocolate Beetroot Brownies also from River Cottage. They turned out amazingly rich, moist, and generally heavenly. On our last night with Susie and Kevin we had the brownies with the ice cream for dessert, and it was true bliss. Sorry there's no picture of it all together, but you can imagine that it didn't stay on the plates very long!

The recipe for the Brownies can be found here:
http://www.rivercottage.net/SeasonalRecipes~October/679/ChocolateandBeetrootBrownies.aspx

The Ice Cream: http://www.rivercottage.net/EdibleProjects~Kitchen/244/TheBestIceCreamsintheWorld.aspx