Apricots Like Grandma Used to Make, Not!

Apricots are hardly my favorite stone fruit. I’ll choose a ripe peach any time, a nectarine, a plum, a prune, a plumcot, just about anything.

When it comes to dried fruit, however, apricots are the best. Absent all that water, the tartness of the fruit shines through better than any raisin, craisin, freeze-dried berry or any other modern attempt at “preserved fruit.”

I gained a certain appreciation for this kind of food back before my wife and I were married. After my brief stint at the LA Times, I got a gig as a recipe tester for a woman who was in charge of condiments and preserves for the “New” Joy of Cooking. This was the first ever reworking of that classic cookbook. Now it seems like they come out with a new version every year, but that first one was a pretty big deal.

I made all sorts of wild recipes for jams, jellies, conserves, preserves, etc. There was black pepper pinot noir jelly, prickly pear jelly (yes, from the cactus), plum conserves, strawberry jam, of course, and many, many more. I wound up with so many jars of the stuff we used to joke that we could brick a wall with them.

Then after all my hard work, the “Joyful” folks decided they didn’t want to do a section on canning after all. In their eyes it was a dead or dying art. And judging from all the stories about canning on NPR and cable TV this year, they were completely wrong about that.

I didn’t care. I still got paid. Even better, my name made it into the book, which made it a great Christmas present that year.

Best of all, though, I got pretty good at the canning process and even began putting soup into jars in future years (which is pretty much where this blog came from.)

Not that I’m an expert. I reserve that title for my grandmother. Raised on a farm, married to a farmer and the mother raised two agriculturally minded PhD sons, grandma appreciated the value of packing fruit at the peak of its flavor into jars for when the season ended.

One of my strongest memories of her preserves were the sweet pickles she used to make. I’ve since learned that other folks call these sweet cucumbers piccalilli. To us they were always Grandma Pickles. She wasn’t all that great at cooking meat, so her roasts always came out a bit dry, but she really knew her way around fruit.

One time we visited and found her in her driveway in Orange County patiently tending to a harvest of sliced and pitted apricots as they slowly dried in the southern California sun. My grandparents had long since given up their farm, but still had an orchard filled with dozens of fruit and avocado trees and grandma (and grandpa too) still worked hard at keeping the yard in good shape and putting the fruit up every year.

I wish I could say my apricot sherbet turned out as well as her dried fruit did.

(Sigh)

The problem was that I started with dried apricots. I thought I’d be clever and reconstitute them in simple syrup, but the texture was all wrong and the taste wasn’t really ideal either. My girls wouldn’t even finish the two scoops I served them.

I’ll get it right next time, or the time after that.

One of my last memories of my grandma was when I came to her house in Santa Ana and asked  her about canning fruit. I was still years away from learning how to cook, so I don’t know what got me interested in it all of a sudden, but she was really excited to talk about it. She took me into the hallway and opened up a pantry full of preserved pickles and fruit she’d patiently preserved over the years. Then she pulled down a package of fruit pectin out of her pantry for me to take home and practice with.

The results of this week’s recipe show that more practice is in order. What I don’t need is more patience, for that I’ve had some pretty good role models.

Apricot Sherbet
(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cup water
1 ½ cup sugar
1 ½ lb dried apricots
2 cups milk

1. Dissolve sugar into water in a bowl over medium heat. This is your simple syrup.
2. Add apricots to the hot, clear liquid and cool overnight in the refrigerator.
3. Puree the apricots in the simple syrup until smooth. You may use a bar blender or a immersion blender for this, but I recommend the former. The immersion blender didn’t really do it for me.
4. Add apricot mixture and milk to a bowl and chill for several hours.
5. Place bowl in your freezer until ice crystals start to form.
6. Transfer the mixture into your ice cream freezer and freeze. (35 minutes did it for me.)
7. Put the frozen sorbet into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it the chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Dried Apricots” by the author, the picture that is not, alas, the apricots. I am not my grandmother. (Yet)

 This is not the first time I’ve struggled with the seasonality of ingredients. From time to time I let my enthusiasm cloud my judgement and buy fresh out of season. Other times, I get by with dried, frozen or reconstituted product. I would love to be able to say that I always follow Alice Waters’ rule to buy in season, but I don’t. What do you do? Let me know in a comment.