30 August, 2010
The weather has turned chilly over the past couple of days, so we’ve stepped up the harvest and started stripping all the remaining soft fruit from their bushes.
It was the turn of the gooseberries today, with the Other Half and I steadfastly ignoring a swarm of wasps to pick the last 1.5kg of berries.
We’ve already eaten our fill of fresh gooseberries—eating them at least twice a week for the past six weeks—and the jam shelf is full, so we needed a different method for preserving them for winter use.
We opted for preserving them in sugar syrup, much as we did with the surplus plums last year.
The berries were topped and tailed, with any over-ripe ones picked out, before being thoroughly washed and then drained.
A bit of experimenting revealed we could fit most of the gooseberries into four 225g jars and they’d need 1.5 litres of syrup to cover them.
While the Other Half cleaned the jars and popped them in the oven to sterilise, I made the syrup by dissolving 500g of sugar in 1.2 litres of water and then boiled it hard for 10 minutes.
The cleaned gooseberries were packed into the hot jars, hot syrup was poured over the top and the lids lightly screwed down.
The jars of gooseberries were popped into a hot water bath and boiled for 10 minutes.
It was a fiddle extracting the jars as we don’t have a pair of bottle tongs, but we managed in the end—without cracking a jar.
The lids were screwed down hard and the jars are now cooling, ready to go in the larder tomorrow.
We’ll have a jar of gooseberries as a monthly treat in the coldest, darkest months, when a little bottled sunshine will go a long way.
they look lovely, pretty to look at and delicious to eat. Of all the things youve shown on here, they are the most tempting I think!
I don’t think I’ve ever eaten gooseberries! Mr 5 was asking when we’d get a mango again today (we don’t own a tree).
Purple, red and amber gooseberries are the sweet, dessert ones that can be eaten raw as well as cooked. Green gooseberries need to be cooked and sweetened—raw ones will make you shudder.
Gooseberry jam is awesome. Enjoy when you get to tasting it