Frugal, Festive 'Champers'

Frugal, Festive Fruit or Flower 'Champagne'

 

A special blog post about cheap plonk, for 'THEO THE RANDY' and 'TEAM PUGH'.

 

It's not too late to make some for Christmas, if you have surplus fruit available.

 

Elderflower fizz & clootie dumpling

How to make the frugaldom 'champagne' is something I learned while spending time on a tiny island called Shapinsay, which is off the coast of mainland Orkney. It was some time ago, back in the 20th Century, so I can't remember when, only how.

 

This friend (thank you, Emma) taught me the secrets of frugal gourmet wines, from red clover to rhubarb. So easy and so cheap to make. For this, I will always be grateful.

 

For the clootie dumping recipe, that's thanks to my Gt, Gt Granny Kerr, the recipe for that can be found HERE and can also be found in the Frugaldom forum.

 

SPARKLING RHUBARB 'CHAMPAGNE'

 

You can substitute rhubarb with whatever surplus non-citrus fruit/edible flowers you have: brambles, red clover, honeysuckle, elderflowers, but don't add a full kilo of flower heads. (I wonder if nasturtiums would work?)

 

INGREDIENTS

1kg chopped fruit
1kg white sugar - reduce according to how sweet the fruit is, I've used half this in past.
1/2 cup vinegar (I used cider vinegar)
1 sliced lemon
5 litres boiling water

Thoroughly clean and sterilise your bucket. Pour in the boiling water, lemons and sugar, stir to dissolve. Add the chopped rhubarb. (I just top it, tail it and wash it, I don't peel it, as the red skins make pink champagne.)

 

Stir the contents of the bucket, cover and leave to stand in a cool, dark place. I give the contents a stir every day for about 5 days, then strain off all the fruit through muslin, cotton or fine net before bottling in glass bottles with secure caps.

 

When straining the fruit from the liquid, I cut the centre out of the lid of the bucket and used that to clip the cotton in place. The buckets with lids are easy to come by - just ask anyone who's bodybuilding and they'll have plenty of whey shake buckets to rehome.

 

Whatever colour fruit or flowers you use will dictate the colour of the resulting liquid. This batch was a result of a mixture of green and red stem rhubarb, but it paled to pink when done.

 

Clip top bottles are great if you can salvage any, but ordinary glass bottles with sloping sides and screw caps work equally well.

 

Now, I'll also admit to baking the strained rhubarb into crumbles after straining it from the liquid! Zero waste! From the ingredients stated, I can bottle 5 litres of liquid. 





This wine (it's naturally fermenting as time passes) does get a champagne-like fizz fairly quickly, so it's best to check the bottles and caps frequently.

 

The end result, as seen here, is ready for drinking within a couple of weeks of bottling, so there's still time to get a Christmas 2012 batch made.

 

CHEERS!

Storage-wise, I have managed to successfully keep this from one year to the next... other than the year it froze solid and burst the bottles.

 

Oh! And there was also the jet-propelled pink champagne rocket episode, which included a small explosion as a result of my testing out 2 litre fizzy drinks bottles. 

 

If storing it for longer (or in plastic bottles, as suggested elsewhere), don't forget to check the bottles & caps every so often. They WILL explode, just like my 4 bottles of blackberry 'champagne' fizz, they took off like rockets!

 

Frugaldom

www.frugaldom.com