Gooseberry Curd

I'm staying with my parents in the Forest of Dean and the weather has improved hugely. It seems that as the summer holidays have begun the sun has decided to come out. Perfect weather for fruit picking and a spot of light weeding in the family garden. The fruit patch is a bit of a jungle, black currants fight against the gooseberries for space and light and the raspberries are hogging almost half of the patch with thick trucks of raspberry canes; it makes for difficult picking, especially when the best gooseberries are in the centre of the briar.
Licking my wounds I weighed my haul and found I had just shy of 2lb of the hairy tart fruits.

A quick google search later and I had found a recipe for gooseberry curd and typically I didn't follow it to the T. I topped and tailed the gooseberries and popped them into a large saucepan with a glug of water and brought to a buoyant boil, letting them burst.
I quickly realised that I had put a bit too much water into the pan so I drained it off and the gooseberry pulp that was left I blitzed with a hand blender. I reserved the cooking water to add back to the pulp if I needed to slurry it up a bit. This pulp I then pushed through a sieve to remove the seeds and then the resultant gooseberry puree was spooned into a jelly bag and hung up with a collecting bowl underneath.

I wonder if the effort I went to just to get 200ml of gooseberry juice was worth it, it was time consuming and I confess that to speed things up I did squeeze the jelly bag, a cardinal sin in jelly making as it makes the jelly cloudy, but I'm not going for a clear jelly here but a curd so I figured it was okay.

When this 200ml of gooseberry juice was ready I popped two bonne maman jam jars into the oven without their lids, and turned the oven on to 150C, letting it warm up and sterilise the jars.

I weighed out 3.5 oz of unsalted butter and put it into a pyrex bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water. When this had completely melted I added 80z of golden caster sugar and the berry juice. This was heated until the sugar had dissolved and then 2 whole eggs and 1 egg yolk (kindly supplied by my parents chickens), were added to the pan and whisked quickly. Apparently the trick to not ending up with scrambled eggs is to keep the heat low and keep stirring, well I did that and had no trouble with chunks of egg white in the curd.

This mixture was then heated until it had thickened, this took AGES and I had to keep stirring it all the time, I ended up looking at websites for hints about when it's ready. Jam is ready when a drop is put on a chilled plate and you move it with a finger to see if it has set, I tried that with the curd and it didn't work. I guess this is because it sets slowly in the fridge, like custard. I used a jam thermometer to reach a temperature of 75C which, according to the joy of baking is the temperature at which the curd is done.

When it was ready I poured it into the jam jars, it made 1 and half in total and then put it into the fridge.

It was delicious!

If I'm honest though, the phaff of making the gooseberry juice was such that I probably shan't make it again, but I won't ever begrudge a high price for it at a farmers market. It does open up the concepts of curds made with all kinds of fruit juices, not just lemon!