The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Logger
Kat Riach runs an off-grid bakery from her farm in Fife and is passionate about local, seasonal food
Sun dances
What do you do when you’re rapidly approaching the end of autumn, and you’re left with homegrown produce that, despite regular sun dances to encourage it to blush with ripeness, remains resolutely in a state of vividness?
In our polytunnel there were a surprising number of fruits left on the tomato vines which had grown to a sufficient size, but which hadn’t even started to blush red.
While feeding these to our pigs and chickens was an option, we were keen to use them for culinary purposes. After pulling all of the remaining fruits from our tomato vines, we donated the stalks to our pigs and chickens, and resolved to throw the fruits into making some Christmas chutney.
Start by taking a 7cm piece of ginger and bashing it with the end of a rolling pin to release the flavour, combine with 2-3 red chillies (optional) and secure in a piece of muslin which you can tie to the side of your pan.
We used 1.5kg of green tomatoes, the recipe can be adjusted to suit what you have, to this we added 900g seasonal cooking apples, 450g of shallots (or small onions), 450g sultanas, 1.75 litres of wine vinegar, 450g demerara sugar, the juice of 2 lemons, 25g mustard seeds (optional), 50g salt.
Chutney always involves a lot of chopping, but once this stage is complete, it can happily be left bubbling away in the background while you are doing other things.
Roughly slice the tomatoes, peel, chop and core the apples, and add, with the remaining ingredients, into a heavy based pan.
Secure your muslin bag to the side of the pan, so that the contents dangle into the other ingredients. Start over a low heat to dissolve the sugar, and then simmer for 2 hours without covering.
After this, your chutney will have bubbled down to a thick, dark consistency.
While still warm, pour into warm sterilise ed jars. As the flavour of this chutney will improve over weeks, made now, this would be an excellent handmade gift for Christmas.