3 From 1- Cooking With Blackcurrant

It's berry time and there's so many different things you can do with them while they're fresh, but the options of preserving them aren't that many. Usually we use same old options: freezing, making jam or dehydrating them. And if you want to preserve berries in different ways then you usually would need quite a lot of these berries.
But actually you can make different things from few liters of berries and do it with zero waste.
With few liters we can make:
- syrup;
- jam;
- pink sugar with blackcurrant flavor.

Juice steamer

Pots for cooking syrup and jam

Spoons (It can be other heat resistant utensils because they won't release chemicals into hot food or react with acidic foods)

Bowl

Funnel

Glass jars (Use heatproofed jars so you can sterilize them before filling up. By sterilizing them you can prevent jam getting moldy and prolong storing time longer)

Glass bottles (Bottles needs to be heatproofed as well)

Baking paper for drying sugar (you can use something else indtead)

For this part we will need:
~7l of berries (it depends on capacity of steamer);
300gr of sugar (if berries are sweet then you can add less or if their are sour you might need more sugar, so, when you make your syrup give it a taste so you could make as sweet as you want).

1. Rinse berries in cold water and put them in the top pot were are many tiny holes.
2. Fill the lowest pot with water.
3. Put all parts of steamer together and let the water in pot boil.
4. After few minutes syrup will start to drip out of steamer. Collect it all in pot where you can afterwards heat the syrup before bottling it up.
(Every 10-25min check if there's still water in and never leave it without any water because with out it you can't steam berries as good + it damages the steamer.)
5. Steam them ~50 min. (You can stop it when berries have lost have of their mass.)
6. Add sugar to the syrup and steady stir while you heat it. After a while there will be foam on top of the syrup. Remove them and collect in bowl. When you syrup starts to bubble you know it's ready for bottling up. (When you syrup starts to bubble you know it's ready for bottling up.)

7. Using a funnel fill the bottles with your syrup and close them right away .

8. Let bottles cool down.

Afterwards you can keep your syrup even in room temperature for months. When you store bottles you should choose dark, dry place for them and even though you can keep them in room temperature, they last longer if you store them in colder place.

Whit this syrup you can make differed kind of things starting from alcoholic drinks and finishing as food coloring for deserts.

For this part we will need:
Steam berries;
300gr of sugar;
300ml of water (you can add water to the jam depending how thick you want it to be);

1. Put berries in pot (if you want you can blend them or just squish as I did).
2. Add water but if you want your jam to be really thick you can skip it. I did it because it was bit too thick (thicker jam you need to stir more often because hot air bubbles will burst your jam everywhere).
3. Add sugar and stir.
4. Heat it up till the jam start to bubble and make foam (remove foam same way as you did for syrup).
5. Fill your jam in jars and turn them upside down (by turning them upside down you make lid to be sucked down into the vacuum, creating stronger seal).

When they cool down to room temperature you can turn them around and store it in dark dry place (same as with syrup- if you want them to last longer store in cold place).

For this part we will need:
Foam from syrup and jam;
500gr of sugar

1. Poor sugar in foam and mix it till all sugar has changed its color.
2. Spread it out on baking sheet and let it air dry. (For me it took 2days.)
3. When the sugar is dry you can leave it in big chunks, rub through a sieve or make it as powdered sugar.

After that you can store it the same way as regular sugar.
There is many options where you can use this sugar... You can add it to your drinks to get extra flavor, use as decoration for desserts ext.