Cooking 250 days in advance?

Asparagus season? Nonsense! Just bottle your lovely seasonal fruit and vegetables so you can enjoy them 250 days later in the year. Rudolf Brand, chef at CIRCL, is very keen on bottling. He’s not only drawn strongly to the practice on a personal level, he also believes it fits perfectly with the circular way of thinking practised at CIRCL.

What is home bottling?

Bottling (also known as preserving) enables you to store products for longer. It’s ideal for when you have a large quantity of fruit or vegetables and don’t want to waste anything. Not only is it a great way of preserving food, bottling also does something very special to the flavour, transforming it and making it much more intense. Traditionally, glass jars are used for bottling. First of all, you need to disinfect them very carefully. Then you fill the jars with the ingredients to be preserved, and close them with a lid secured by a bracket, with a rubber ring to maintain the seal. The next step is to heat the jar containing the ingredients. This kills most of the microorganisms and expels the remaining air in the top of the jar. After cooling, the products can often be stored for a longer period of time.

Home bottling in ten steps

1. Make the marinade starting with the fluid ingredients and then the hard ingredients.
2. Heat the marinade.
3. Cut, wash and mix the vegetables or fruit. Try to retain the shape of your product as much as possible when cutting it. Choose seasonal products so that you immediately have a good combination of fruits or vegetables for preserving.
4. Prepare clean preserving jars.
5. Fill the jars with freshly chopped vegetables or fruit.
6. Allow the marinade to cool slightly and then use it to fill the preserving jar to the brim.
7. Close the lid.
8. Heat a 5cm layer of water to 80°C in a saucepan, place an inverted plate on the bottom, and stand the jar on it, in the water.
9. Pasteurise for around 20 minutes with the lid on the pan.
10. Allow it to cool for at least 4 hours and store for a maximum of 1 year (unrefrigerated). The marinade will start working on the product inside the jar. The longer you wait, the more the flavours of the marinade and the fruit or vegetables will enhance each other.

Note: once you open the jar, you must store it in the refrigerator.