This Year's Harvest
I should have paid more attention to this year’s strawberry harvest, which eventually became three strawberry desserts: a tart, a cake, and a jam. My negligence has led to the discard of many strawberries that got sunburnt. The discarded ones have either turned mushy (early stage of sunburn) or have shrivelled up. This year, I picked the strawberries almost two weeks later than I did in June last year — my post from last year shows the first round of harvest took place at the beginning of June, but this year I didn’t get to it until closer to mid-June.
Strawberry Tart
I planned to make a tart with the strawberries. Thinking that there might not be enough strawberries for the tart, I bought a punnet of strawberries (250g) from the supermarket. It was an unnecessary purchase as I realised later that I actually had more than enough strawberries in the patch. As such, I picked only the ripest ones, close to 250g from the garden, and hoped the rest would survive a few more days out in the garden.
So, I made the tart with 500g of strawberries, though only half came from my own garden. For the crust, I started from scratch with flour, butter, eggs and sugar, then filled it with crème pâtissière (a creamy custard made from egg yolks, milk, sugar, cornstarch and vanilla pods). I based the recipe on www.750g.com. The result looked presentable but the taste was only acceptable — a sweeter, crunchier crust would have made the tart better. I’ll need to tweak the recipe a little next time.
Strawberry Cake
It was a bit too soon to make another strawberry dessert, but I urgently needed to bring in the second strawberry harvest a week later. I really had to pick the rest of the strawberries before they all went to waste. The bounty came close to 750g.
I used a third of the second harvest for a strawberry cake. I was hoping for a light chiffon Japanese cake topped with homemade whipped cream and strawberries. Unfortunately, I must have made a boo-boo somewhere as the cake came out not as light as I wanted. On the other hand, the homemade chantilly (heavy cream with sugar) was more successful, making the cake more palatable :-).
Strawberry Jam
The remaining two-thirds of the strawberry harvest went into the making of jam — the last of this year’s three strawberry desserts. Various online recipes stated that most store-bought jams contain as much sugar as strawberries. My remaining 500g of strawberries required 500g of sugar! Since store-bought jams were usually a tad too sweet for me, I decided to cut the sugar down to 40%. Luckily I had reduced the sugar because the final product was still too sweet!
Where It Went Wrong
Another mistake I made was being too impatient. The recipe I found advised cooking the mixture over a ‘feu doux’, that is, on low heat. After simmering the mixture for one hour, it still retained too much fluid. To speed up the process, I turned up the fire by two notches and left it cooking without supervision while I continued grading the exams (it was the period of finals at universities). When I emerged from the grading daze barely 15 minutes later and rushed to the stove, it was too late. The mixture was already bubbling. I turned down the fire immediately and started stirring the jam. The jam had turned viscous, with small clumps.
The jam was of course still edible. However, the low temperature of the fridge had made the jam more viscous than before. To use the jam, one had to apply a bit of pressure on the spoon to scoop out the jam 🙂 Three strawberry desserts down for the year — tart, cake, and jam — all from one very late harvest.