I love the summer season, which brings me, to my immense delight, a magnificent and abundant variety of fruits and vegetables. This abundance feeds my artistic side, fills my head with tasty recipes and satisfies my heart.
I love how simple it is to transform strawberries with just a few ingredients and a little time. So here are a few recipes borrowed from here and there:
First of all, you need a good variety of strawberries, and lots of them. To make my recipes, I bought a well-stocked tray (better known as a crate). I washed the strawberries in water, then hulled and sorted them by size.
The first step is to set the strawberry tails aside in a container to make the strawberry water and jelly, which consists of adding 1 cup of water to 4 cups of strawberry tails and 1/4 cup of sugar (I stay away from refined white sugar). Stir lightly and refrigerate for 24 to 48 hours. We’ll come back to this later…
You’ll need sugar, either maple or cane, a few cups to make the 5 recipes. You’ll also need one or two coarsely ground long peppercorns or dune peppercorns.
Strawberry syrup: Take 2lbs ripe strawberries cut in half, 1 1/2 cups sugar and 4 cups water. Put into a saucepan and boil for 5 minutes.
Strawberry Tombée: The aim here is to reduce whole strawberries, water and sugar to a syrupy consistency.
Strawberry jam, maple sugar and long pepper: cut strawberries into 4, add water, maple sugar and long pepper at the end of cooking.
Strawberry water: after chilling time (as indicated above), strain the liquid through a fine sieve or absorbent cotton. At this stage, the madness sets in, you have to taste and let yourself be inspired by the thousand and one avenues, such as: making ice cubes for drinks, jelly for desserts, as an accompaniment to aperitifs, as it is in juice to flavour sparkling water, to add to a simple vinaigrette…..
