I found this gorgeous recipe for fig and vanilla preserve in my book Wild Sourdough – by Yoke Mardewi -this is a really fantastic book with lots of easy to follow (and tasty!) sourdough bread recipes. Myself and M went to one of Yoke’s workshops in basic sourdough bread while we were living in Perth - there will be a post on this soon -we had such a fantastic experience with Yoke and really enjoyed her classes, please click here for a link to Yoke’s website.
Ingredients
1kg figs
750 g sugar
1 vanilla pod
1 lemon
5 cm/couple of chunks of preserved stem ginger
Helpful Tip - Try to
buy the figs the same day you intend on making the jam, otherwise (if you’re
me) you will need to pick out all the lovely figs that have somehow turned soft
and slightly furry overnight.
Start by carefully picking through your figs, discard (or
compost) any figs that have turned soft or furry or if it’s not too mushy, cut out
the bit that’s gone bad and use the good bits
Reweigh your figs. Realise that you now only have 600 g of
figs rather than 1 kg. Recalculate and reweigh your sugar (it should now be 450 g) so your sugar to fig ratio
isn't going to leave you with a preserve so high in sucrose it makes your teeth
squeak.
Cut the remainder of figs into chunks, open the vanilla pod with
a sharp knife and scrape out the seeds and place both vanilla pod and seeds
into the preserving pan (heavy based saucepan) with the figs. Add the juice
from the lemon. Simmer gently over a low heat until the figs have turned soft
and gooey, stirring occasionally.
In the meantime, finely chop the preserved ginger into small
chunks – sample a few chunks of the ginger while waiting for the figs to
soften. Chop up more ginger
Once the figs are nicely soft, add the sugar and chopped
ginger and cook on a rolling boil for approximately 7-10 minutes. Test the
preserve for a set using the wrinkle test.
Bottle the fig preserve in sterilized jars, label and date. This preserve should keep for
a year if the jam jars have been sterilized properly and bottled while still
hot.
Because I had just over half the quantity of figs the recipe
calls for, I ended up with just one and a half
jars of fig preserve. This isn't a huge quantity for the amount of
effort, but the preserve is quite rich so a smear of figgy preserve on brown
toast with brie is just divine and less is definitely more as the vanilla and
ginger make it a very fragrant jam. The smell alone of the warm vanilla infusing
with the almost spicy ginger while the figs simmered was well worth all the effort.
Fig,
and figgy are some of my favourite words, alongside noodle and pudding...I am
aware most of my favourite words are food related but that’s just how I roll.
