At Last . . . . It's Ready!

You'll be pleased to hear that the raspberry balsamic vinegar project has reached a conclusion. It wasn't as straightforward as I had hoped but I think that the end result is pretty good. And I've got a confession to make - I DID eventually source the raspberries in East Lothian - it's just that they were in the freezer compartment in Lidl's in the 'Pans! Well, when I priced the top quality fresh berries in the farm shop, it was going to cost about £15 to make before even getting the base vinegars. I hope you'll agree that this wouldn't be economically viable.

Anyway, the recipe I used after finding it on-line was:

900g raspberries

600ml red wine vinegar

The raspberries were to be mashed to a pulp before adding the vinegar and then the mixture was to be left for 5 days, stirring occasionally.

Then, the vinegary pulp was to be strained through muslin to extract only the juice and for every 600ml of juice, 450g of sugar was to be added.

Boil the mix for 10 min, skimming off any scum, and then bottle.

Easy!

Not so easy!

The problems I encountered were:

• I wanted a balsamic vinegar so I used 350ml of balsamic and 250ml of red wine vinegar. This, I think, made my initial mix too sweet
• I had a lot of trouble straining the pulp. Even after several hours, the muslin I had, seemed to be clogged up so I had to empty it out and clean it. I had to do this several times before I got all the juice through. Does anybody know a better way to do this? An old fashioned jelly bag I think
• I got 1 litre of juice extracted so I added 750g of sugar. The final product was very sweet and 'jammy' - very viscose. To get round this, I got another couple of bottles (2 x 350ml) of balsamic and mixed them in
• I then strained it through a fine sieve to remove the sugary 'globules' and this time it was fine with an excellent consistency. Interestingly though, although I had added an extra 700ml of liquid, I only got one extra 350ml bottle out. Now that's magic! But not good magic

So now I've left it to mature for all of . . . . . 2 days - and the tasting was today, along with a selection of antipasti, fresh bread for dipping and a bottle of South African Sauvignon Blanc. Just about a perfect Sunday afternoon along with the papers.

Dipping crusty bread into flavoured balsamic like this is one of my favourite things. The flavour is so sweet/sour, it's amazing. In fact, I wonder if you could use it to flavour drinks like gin. I think I'll try it - just a small amount around the glass and pour in the gin. I'll let you know.

I hope you like our blue wine beakers in the picture. They're recycled, posh yoghurt pots (La Fermiere) from Bunney's. Pretty good really and dishwasher safe.