Those reading this blog yesterday, will have seen my post about the utterly delicious sage and apple jelly I made from the apple glut at our new house.
The jelly was fantastic, but it didn’t make a big enough dent in our apple pile (which I sadly didn’t photograph, so you’ll just have to imagine a lovely wicker basket overflowing with apples). Next to try was a variation on lemon curd, found in the River Cottage guide to preserves: Bramley Lemon curd.
We didn’t have bramley apples but we figured, quite rightly, that our apples would be just as delicious. Now, I have to admit, I didn’t make this one myself. I read through the recipe and found references to things like double steamers and heating it to a certain exact temperature and was immediately put off. I’m more of a chuck-the-ingredients-in-give-it-a-stir-every-now-and-then-until-it-tastes-good kinda cook. Stews not souffles, that’s my style. Luckily, my partner loves fiddly cooking (he can spend hours pre-chopping the veg to the perfect millimetre before so much as turning on the oven) so I put myself in charge of apple chopping and him in charge of the making.
To be fair to Jamie, and the recipe, once he’d started he made it look a lot more straightforward than it sounded. And within 30 minutes we’d made ourselves some gorgeous tasting (Not) Bramley lemon curd.
I’ve just had a quick Google and it turns out this recipe has been published by the Guardian so is available online: River Cottage Bramley lemon curd recipe. I strongly recommend you make your own if you’ve got a few apples spare. We followed the recipe to the letter, but found we needed to heat the mixture for a lot more than ten minutes to get the right consistency: it ended up being closer to 25 by the time it was thick enough.
Best of all, we’ve still got some apples left…
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Here are some more cooking ideas for apples if, like me, you’ve got a few on your hands…
