Cooking corner: Preserves :)

Russia, summer, preserves. That just went together period. Always did it.
And here we go. Moscow. Preserves festival.

They did not do it just easy little thing , they went big. Big city, big festival. 3000 stores 1000 restaurants participated... News say 10+ ton of preserves were sold... From the usual raspberry to something quite unusual... in one of popular cartoons (the plot is the kid is messing up bear's preserves making and no berry, so she uses vegetables and pine cones too)

so pine cones, you thought that would not exist right. wrong :) it made the biggest queue of customers there according to news

It exists :). pine cones are soft, helps with cold and stuff. What do you know....

To deal with cold we used raspberry for that, wild from the forest, use  1/1 with sugar by weight aka 1kg raspberry (white is best) and 1kg sugar, mix, let sit, mash it, do not need to bold it, just put in jars it stores in room temperature, at least we did. jars we did pasterize as usual fora any preserves of any kind over boiling water for at least 20 min. I hear folk use washing machine with sanitize option here to do the same.

So what do they sy about pine cones preserves... They use young green cones of Russian pine, May-June.
this guy has even video of pine cone honey making

Понадобится:
1 кг шишек,
1 кг сахару,
2 литра воды.

Сосновые шишки залить холодной водой и оставить на сутки для вымачивания. Слить воду с шишек и сварить сахарный сироп, погрузить в него шишки и варить до тех пор, пока все шишки не раскроются.


1лп зшту сщтуыб пкуутПонадобится:
1 кг шишек,
1 кг сахару,
2 литра воды.

Сосновые шишки залить холодной водой и оставить на сутки для вымачивания. Слить воду с шишек и сварить сахарный сироп, погрузить в него шишки и варить до тех пор, пока все шишки не раскроются.

2liters of water

1kg sugar (Russian use beat sugar)

1kg pine cones, green. like these

Cover pine cones with cold water, let soak for a day, room temperature. Discard water. Make simple syrup from sugar, pit pine ones in there nd simmer till they open and the liquid turns pink-red. takes 1.5- 2h

Other method of simmering is classic Russian 3-trep: simmer for 30 min, take aside, cool down, repeat 3 times and put into jars hot after the last (3-rd) simmering session.

Do they sell this kind of stuff outside of festivals? Yep. One of the markets

PS: good forest picking practice: we never collect any food in the forest next to auto roads. Pollution etc, heavy metals...