The drive to the farm

It all started innocently enough. Matt jumped in the car to pick up some of the first strawberries of the season, at a farm about an hour outside of Madison. Usually we have our produce delivered, but we just couldn’t wait to get started!

Waterlogged field

It was a rainy day, meaning the farmers weren’t sure if they’d be able to pick or not.

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At the kitchen

But Matt returned with plenty of berries! We started making our first batch the next day.

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First try

Unfortunately, this is really not how it’s supposed to look! When we developed the recipe, we were testing in February – meaning the berries weren’t so great. Local, seasonal strawberries are juicier, tarter and sweeter than the ones you usually see. We had to completely recalibrate our plan. This batch, sadly, went down the drain. It was waaaay overcooked!

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Pallet arrives!

Meanwhile, as Matt was recovering from having poured 13 hours of work down the drain, an entire pallet of strawberries arrived!! Now the clock was ticking: we had to figure out the new recipe before the berries molded – we had a few days at the most. We spent night after night in the kitchen toying and tweaking. Our gut instincts told us we needed less sugar, even though the berries were more tart. We finally got the recipe down, and it was on!

The strawberry huller

With just two days left to process all the strawberries, we frantically worked to get it all done. We didn’t want to waste a single berry. Clare turned out to be the master huller – using this little forky thing she pulled the tops off strawberries for 9 hours in one day. Matt pulled off two 20-hour days in a row to cook and jar the entire pallet.
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The process:

Clare hard at work

Late!

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Looks better!

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And, at last, success!

Victory!

Most of the jars

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Satisfaction.

As you can imagine, we’re quite excited! We produced almost 1000 jars. And, we just found out today that Wisconsin had one of the worst strawberry seasons in history, and there aren’t any more left. So now we’re thanking our lucky stars for our crazy weekend. We’re going to see if we can get our hands on any Michigan berries before the season ends – we’ll keep you posted. Who knew the lives of preserves makers could be so dramatic!

Today, I, Matt, want to give you a sense of the actual work of that goes into developing and refining a new preserve.

The first step, of course, is to come up with a good idea. I’ve been playing around with concepts for a strawberry jam for awhile, and was leaning in the direction of adding herbal background notes to complement the woodiness you get in a wild strawberry. So, I sat down and thought through all the flavors in strawberries that I like and what I wanted to play off of.

After a lot of brainstorming and research, I eventually narrowed my list of ingredients down to five or six spices and herbs which I wanted to concentrate on, which meant it was time to start experimenting. I wrote out a game plan for different things I wanted to try, involving varying ratios of ingredients and methods of preparation. Here’s a peek at some of my notes:

Once I have a plan established, I move to the kitchen. We keep it clean and organized, and have everything I need, from tools to ingredients to jars, readily available.

The strawberry preserve has been a challenge because I needed to find a way to bring out the herb and spice flavors without overpowering the berries. I settled, after a few tests, on simmering the herbs in water, making a kind of tea, and then straining them out. Here they are simmering away:

Then, after straining, I add the berries.

I bring the whole thing to a boil, stir, add a few more accent ingredients and, when they’re done, put preserves in a jar to cool. Then, I repeat the process with all of the other test batches I have planned for the day.

Eventually, we get a whole range of test jars, each slightly different from the others. Here’s the collection of strawberry tests:

I allow the jars to cool overnight and the next morning come in and do a thorough tasting of each preserve. I look at everything: the texture, the flavors, the sugar level, the tartness, the color, the smell, how it looks in the jar, etc. Most preserves don’t make the cut, but do give valuable insight into what needs to be tweaked and adjusted for the next round of test batches. All in all, I will usually do between 25 and 30 test batches before I get a preserve just right.

We’re still experimenting with the strawberry, so we have no idea what the final version will look like! But, we’ll know when we taste it. We always know when we’ve found the right recipe.

And while we’re there, we’ll be doing a tasting at Pastoral on Broadway, 5-7 Friday night! So come meet us, learn about preserve making – and we’ll give you all the samples you can eat.

The DailyCandy article says: “Music to the ears.” Okay!

The Famed All-Wisco Burger

This delicious burger is topped with Q&A’s Shallot Confit with Red Wine and Carr Valley Billy Blue goat cheese. Mix those tasty treats with Fountain Prairie grass-fed ground beef and a Fayze’s Talame Bun and you got yerself one serious burger.

This delectable food photo received a grand prize from Facebook’s Cheese & Burger Society Photo Challenge. Nice!

Tuesday, February 9, 4-7pm
Madison Enterprise Center (100 South Baldwin)
Drop in anytime!
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