Making verjus with backyard harvest

Sometimes you literally stumble on something. Like the abundant grape crop impeding my husband from cutting the grass. Or the verjus I was offered to flavor my water at a recent outing in a farm-to-table and locavore restaurant. Because local means no lemon or lime.

Verjus? Turns out, this is a thing. Its an old as time recipe, made from not quite ripe grapes, apples or crabapples, that reduces them to a tart juice to be used in recipes, water, to make jam. Compared to a lemon, but more like tamarind, its a flavour enhancer. Called verjus in France, verjuice in England, and sour grapes in Persian cooking.

The longest part of processing is the labour intensive removal of grapes to stem. Then I parboiled, blendered, filtered to remove skins and bits, boiled down to make jam or used in recipes. The jam is downright delicious, and although the sugar content (2 cups white sugar to 5 cups of verjus) was low Im still planning on making another recipe sugar free with some of those blackberries I picked last week.

An unusual harvest this year, no doubt prompted by severe spring pruning

After stemming, they were parboiled which is probably unnecessary

Blender was much easier than mashing

Unflitered verjus in seconds

Now filtering skins and woody bits

Stirring fast to move the liquid through

The mulch left over after filtering. Still some juice inside.

The mulch provided a good amount of extra juice

And voilà:  verjus!

Made into jam and canned, the verjus jam is incredible with cheese and crackers

Hoping to make another batch of jam with these luscious blackberries