Personal

Car Stuff

Extras

Verjuice

From: honest-food.net

You will need lots of grapes, a food mill, a fine mesh strainer, some Mason jars and some patience. And, if you want your verjus to hold up for a long time in the fridge, you will need a little citric acid. If you really want it to hold up for 6 months or more, add the winemaker’s friend: sodium metabisulfite, which is available at any winemaking shop. This is the “sulfites” you see on wine labels. If you are sensitive to them, skip it.
Makes about 6 cups.

7 pounds unripe grapes
1/4 teaspoon citric acid
1/8 teaspoon sodium metabisulfite

Take most of the stems off the grapes. This will take some time, maybe 30 minutes or so. Longer if you’ve never done it before. But if you don’t do this part, you will have a tough time running the grapes through the food mill.

In batches, grind the grapes through the coarsest plate of your food mill. This will require a little elbow grease. Photo by Hank Shaw As you get a slurry of ground-up grapes and grape juice, pour it into a bowl as you work. You will need to work quickly, as the grape juice will oxidize quickly and turn brown. There is really no getting over this, but the faster you work the greener — or at least more golden — your verjus will be. Work slow and it will look like malt vinegar.

Now you need to run the ground grapes through a fine mesh sieve. If you have rubber gloves, put them on. Why? The acid in these grapes made my hands sting for a couple hours after I squeezed the ground-up grapes over the sieve. And yes, you need to squeeze your grapes because you really want as much liquid as you can extract.

Finally, you will need to pour the strained juice into a Mason jar. It’s at this point that you add the citric acid and sodium metabisulfite, if you are using them. Shake the jar well to mix everything in, then put it in the refrigerator for up to 2 days. There will be a very fine layer of sediment on the bottom. You will not be able to strain this off — it is too fine.

So, what you need to do is gently decant it into a clean container. You will lose some verjus, but that’s OK. If you don’t do this step your verjus will oxidize even more. Nothing bad will happen, but it will look ugly.

Bottle and store in the fridge. It should last for several months in the fridge, and up to 9 months if you use the citric acid and sodium metabisulfite.

How to use your verjus? It is an awesome salad dressing — I recently dressed a wild greens salad with verjus and melted wild duck fat at a book dinner we did in San Francisco — and it is a great thing to use wherever you want a gentle acidity.