Salt-baked sweet potatoes

I'm mulling over whether to grow sweet potatoes again this year. On the plus side, they were less trouble than I'd anticipated, growing happily under a fleece cloche for most of the summer, even when I forgot to water them quite as regularly as they might have liked. On the minus side, the fleece cloche proved not very durable and were I to grow enough sweet potatoes for more than a few portions, they would take up a lot of space. I'm also wary that they grew well because we had a decent summer; in a more normal, cooler growing season, would it all be worth it?

I think I've decided to give it a go again thanks to a startlingly good salt-baked sweet potato I enjoyed the other day. I first encountered baking in salt with Anna Colquhoun and Mia Christiansen and their salt-baked celeriac.

That celeriac was a revelation: baked whole in a salt paste, the flesh was soft enough to be eaten with a spoon, with an intensely sweet celeriac flavour, salt-spiked at the edges near the skin. It's a bit of show-stopper of a dish: brought to the table still in its salt case and cracked open in front of the diners.

I wondered what other root vegetables might also taste good baked this way and after a bit of trial and error, found that sweet potato is exquisite when cooked in salt: the inherent sweetness of the potato is concentrated and the texture, after three hours in a low oven, is pillowy soft and fluffy.

I had good results with beetroot, too, especially the golden beetroot which are a staple of my allotment, but to get really soft and yielding flesh, it really needs to spend up to four hours in the 

oven. Sweet potato gives you a quicker return for your effort.

The trick is to ensure that the salt paste covers the potato completely: no gaps or holes. The paste needs to be made thick enough to hold its shape so that it doesn't all slump to the bottom of the dish as soon as you put it into the oven, but not so hard as to be un-malleable. As the sweet potato cooks, so the paste will harden into a rigid casing.




Recipe
1 large sweet potato, or 2 medium ones

300g cooking salt
280g plain flour
4 egg whites (this is a great way to use up spare egg whites)
Up to 200ml water

Scrub the sweet potato and dry the skin. Place it on a baking tray and pre-heat the oven to 150 degrees C.

Mix the salt and flour in a bowl and add the egg whites in the middle. Begin to beat together, adding the water a little at a time - you may not need it all. Stop when it's like wet Play-Doh - not thin enough to pour and not too thick to spread with a spatula.

Spread the salt mixture over the sweet potato, making sure the whole of the root is covered. Ensure there is salt paste around the base of the potato, so there are no gaps between the potato and the baking tray.

Put into the middle of the oven and bake for 3 hours. The salt paste will harden and turn brown as it bakes. When you remove it after 3 hours, it should be hard to the touch. Cut the top open with a knife, peel back the skin of the sweet potato and spoon out the flesh to eat.

Plums and pickles

With autumn bringing a bracing chill to the air even on sunny days, and even colder nights, it's time to accept that the summer crops are over. Whatever fruit they have produced, they won't be producing much more.

With that in mind, it's time to finish up the remains of some vegetables, and to deal with the gluts in other areas. This year, I've been making lots of simple pickles, experimenting with different flavoured vinegars and aromatics to give the preserved veg a bit of extra zing. Earlier this year I discovered using apple vinegar, thanks to Mia Christiansen and Anna Colquhoun, at their Nordic Cooking Class, and I've used this successfully as the base for pickled quinces and pears, and also pickled beetroot. Last year, I pickled beetroot in horseradish vinegar and while it was delicious, it was also hot enough to blast us from one end of the room to another. Apple vinegar - or cider vinegar, they're the same thing - has made a much softer, more rounded flavour to the pickle.

The beetroot are small, no more than the size of a ping ping ball, because the beets that go in the autumn pickle are the leftovers from the summer crop, the ones that for whatever reason, never really swelled and made it - too many of them the yellow Touchstone Gold variety this year as well. They're small enough to be pickled whole.

Pickled beetroot

Beetroot - about 10-12 small beets

Apple (or cider) vinegar

Salt

½ teasp Szechuan peppercorns

½ teasp coriander seeds

2 chillies

2 garlic chive flowerheads (optional)

Clean the beets and place in a large pan. Cover with cold water, bring to the boil and simmer until just cooked. Much depends on size, but ping pong ball sized beets should be ready after 20 minutes.

Drain and let the beets cool. Meanwhile sterilise a jar into which the beets will fit snugly.

When the beetroot is cool, slip off the skins and trim the root and stem. Pack the jar with the beetroot and aromatics.

In another jar, add 10g salt to every 400ml apple vinegar. Put the lid on and shake the jar vigorously to dissolve the salt. When ready, pour the vinegar/salt solution over the beets so that they are covered. Seal and store in the fridge.

Aside from the question of whether to cook the vegetables or not, the pickling method stays mch the same whatever you are pickling: bring vinegar, salt, and also sometimes sugar, plus herbs and spices to the boil. My husband can't tolerate the smell of boiling vinegar in the house, so I, a) wait until he's out for the day before doing any pickling, and b) heat the vinegar, salt and sugar up in the microwave, as it seems to contain the smell a bit better than on the open hob.

Pack a sterilised jar full of your chosen vegetables, then pour the hot vinegar solution over them. Seal the jar, let it cool down then store in a cool place.

I took much the same route with elephant garlic. These crop produced 4-5 mature bulbs, each with 7-8 mighty cloves; I think  the rest of the plants must have got waterlogged this year. After roasting one whole bulb to mash and serve alongside a Sunday roast, I was left with just enough elephant garlic to pack a 500ml Kilner jar.

Pickled elephant garlic

20 garlic cloves

500ml rice vinegar

1 chilli

2 kaffir lime leaves (optional – you could use bay leaves, or star anise, or nothing at all)

1 tbsp salt

2 tbsp caster sugar

250 ml water

Have a sterilised jar ready. Peel the garlic cloves, leaving them whole.

Place the vinegar, water, salt, sugar and any aromatics in a large pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for five minutes then add the cloves. Bring back to the boil and simmer on for another five minutes. You can do this in the microwave if yours has a good simmer function.

Pour everything into the sterilised jar and seal.

If the elephant garlic has been disappointing this year, like so many other crops, it's also worth noting the successes. I have a very old plum tree - I say very old, but I've no idea exactly how old it is, as I inherited it from the previous allotment holder. Its branches are covered in lichen, and there is no sign of a graft at the base of the trunk so I assume it is self-seeded, or planted before grafting became the norm? 

Thanks to this blog, The Garden Diaries, I think I have identified the variety as a Warwickshire Drooper. Certainly the tree has a somewhat weeping habit, and the plums themselves are yellow, blushed pink where they are exposed to the sun, and also sometimes with a slightly mottled look to them - they are not smooth and supermodel glossy.

The tree is mainly notable for its prolific consistency. Since I started work on this particular allotment nine years ago it has produced an astonishingly large number of plums every single year - and this year it has surpassed itself. Every single branch is laden with fruit. I simply cannot cope with all these plums, and in addition to sheer numbers, this year the fruit has been entirely free of plum sawfly larvae. Most years, despite the greaseband around the trunk and despite the fly trap hung among the branches, a few get through and worm their way into the fruit. This year, none at all.

So, we eat plums straight from the tree. I've made plum crumble and an approximation of Chinese plum sauce. And every year I make up a big jar or two of pickled plums and we eat our way through them over the course of the following year. Tart and fruity and fragrant all at the same time, they go brilliantly with pork, with duck and game, with cheese, and perhaps a bit more surprisingly, they are fantastic with Thai fishcakes.


Pickled plums

40 plums - choose firm-fleshed ones rather than overripe specimens or windfalls

500ml white wine vinegar

600ml water

600g caster sugar

2cm root ginger, sliced (no need to peel)

4 star anise

4 cloves

4 hot red chillies

1 teasp salt

Put the vinegar, salt, sugar and aromatics into a pan and bring to the boil, making sure all the sugar has dissolved.

While the vinegar is heating, wash the plums, halve them and remove the stones. Pack the plums into 2 x 1 litre Kilner jars, which have been sterilised (40 halves per jar).

Once the vinegar mixture reaches boiling point, take it off the heat and pour over the plums, making sure that each jar gets an equal number of star anises, chillies, cloves, etc. (You could scoop out the aromatics before they boil and add them to the jars when they are about halfway full of plums.) Seal the jars and let them cool down at room temperature before transferring to the fridge.

These pickled plums last about 3-4 months (less if they were pretty ripe when picked) before going a bit slushy and syrupy.

Beetroot in the gutter

For the last couple of years, I’ve sown my mange tout and sugar snap peas in lengths of half-guttering. It seems to ensure near 100% germination – especially in the sugar snaps, which I’ve had very variable results with when sown direct. We also get a lot of pea weevil damage at the allotment – those distinct U-shaped bites which make the seedling leaves look very crenellated – and the plants withstand that better if they are bigger when transplanted into pea weevil territory.

(I transplant the pea seedlings when they are about 3 inches tall. I water the plants in the guttering until they are soaking wet, then slide them out of the gutter into a shallow pre-dug. So long as the soil is uniformly very wet the plants slide out with little or no root disturbance.)

I hadn’t thought of starting any other crops off in half-guttering until I was wondering aloud to my plot neighbour why his beetroot were regularly the size of grapefruit while those of mine which germinated were mostly the size of ping pong balls. He suggested sowing the beetroot in half-guttering the same way as with the peas.

In the end I sowed four 1m lengths more or less successionally and while it’s obviously more labour intensive than direct sowing, I got pretty much 100% germination – even from the Burpees Golden variety which are notoriously poor germinators – and a crop which looks as though it’s going to be very uniform in size. I have moved up from ping pong balls to tennis ball sized roots which is also pleasing and will definitely be sowing in guttering again next year.