Making Medlar Cheese

I am making medlar cheese today, it is a long drawn out business and I was thinking about the blog …. I haven’t done one in ages what shall I write about ? So I thought I would write about what I am doing.

A few weeks ago my mother in law was visiting and I asked her to pick the medlars, an old English fruit you hardly see anymore. It can’t be eaten off the tree it has to “bletted” that is, it has to kind of go soft and brown. Wikipedia says “ this process can cause confusion to the new medlar consumer as softened medlar can give the appearance that it has spoiled “ … a lovely turn of phrase to say it looks like it has gone rotten. The Tudors ate them a lot, they can be eaten as a paste out of the skin, which I don’t fancy myself, but then they didn’t have chocolate or ice cream.

Yesterday 10 kg of the 20 kg picked had gone soft and brown so I cut them in half and cooked them with some water. When it had gone all gloopey I pushed it through a sieve – this took me 4 hours at least.

This gave me 10 pints of sieved medlar goo, so today I have added 3 kg of organic raw cane sugar and some organic lemon juice and it has to boil down until it sets. I always find this the hardest bit, as it is a cheese and not a jam. A cheese needs to set to an almost solid consistency – membrillo in Spain is a fruit cheese. So it needs to be boiled and boiled for a long time and be solid or almost solid in the jar.

The setting point of jam is quite easy to spot, you put some on a saucer in the freezer and it kinds of goes wrinkly when cool. The setting point of a cheese is when you can draw a line in the pan with a spoon and it remains there. The thing is I have to do the school run and after a while I just want it to be finished so I start imagining the line staying – did it stay long enough ? Or is it still too runny? I need to put the cheese and jam in the jars scalding hot to get a good seal and stop mould forming so I don’t want to turn it off and start again. So today to stop getting impatient with it I thought I would write the blog in between stirring so it doesn’t burn on the bottom of the pan. It is now gently blubbing on the stove, exploding bits of medlar goo all over the cooker. Its not going to be ready in time for the school run.

Once I have made all 20 kg into cheese it will make about 50 jars, these I sell for £3.50 at a Farmers Markets in Stoke Newington London. The cheese / jam costs me 50 p per jar in costs for the sugar and the jar itself. 50 jars will net me £150 “profit” to pay for the fruit and my time. I reckon it will take me 12 hours to make all 50 jars, and then I will sell them over quite a few markets leading up to Christmas. Along with lots of other jams and butters (another type of old fashioned jam made from fruit) and jellyies as well as apples. Not a huge money spinner! I can pay myself about £10 an hour for making jam and cheese at those prices, and the real bonus is I can multi-task, I can look after the children or write a blog at the same time.

I could put the price up, the only other place I have seen Medlar cheese for sale is in the Toast Catalogue for £4.75 and it wasn’t even organic. The Toast catalogue sells very expensive and lovely women’s clothes that I can’t afford to buy being an organic grower. The wonderful thing about the farmers market is that you can tell very quickly if you have pitched your prices right, by reading peoples expressions and by the sales. If the product doesn’t sell basically you need to put the price down. Perhaps I should try to put the price up then I could afford those Toast trousers!

You can visit my Apricot Centre website at www.apricotcentre.co.uk