TracyFood

Making mincemeat, in non-gory pictures. 26 November 2008 8:02 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,dessert,pictures , trackback

We’re talking the kind without meat, here, for pie. I used the recipe in Baking Illustrated, since Kevin demonstrated its awesomeness at last year’s Thanksgiving. We’re at Peter’s parents’ house in the frozen northlands upstate, so I can’t relate the exact recipe, but I can tell you it involved just over three pounds of Greenmarket apples, 3 pounds of apples, plus golden raisins, dried currants (which are just small raisins, did you know that? I’m still a little shocked myself), orange and lemon juice and zest, brown sugar, spices, and oh yeah… a whole stick of butter. NOM. Here’s what the cooking process looked like:

There’s about an hour of cooking between each of those pictures, start to finish. The end result weighed just over three and a half pounds:

but it had reduced quite a bit and I only weighed the fruit ingredients, so I have no idea how much liquid I cooked off (I added a little cider when I was scared it would burn, and at the end finished it with Grand Marnier instead of the brandy or rum the original recipe called for, because hey, orangey goodness that we don’t use often enough, and also I hadn’t used any of the candied orange peel the original recipe suggested as optional).