Preserving fruit And Vegetables

Preserving fruit and vegetables Pholamai klap chat, or “reincarnated fruit”, is a traditional local technique for preserving fruit and vegetables most commonly used to turn the hard, extremely bitter stem of a traditional Thai herb known as boraphet (Tinospora cordifolia) into a delicious candy-like sweet that can keep for months. The same process can also be applied to other bitter foods such as grapefruit peel, bitter gourd, bergamot, and Chinese ginger (fingerroot).

How to preserve boraphet:

• After peeling and washing the boraphet stems, leave them overnight in a strong brine made of one part salt to five parts water.

• The next day, stir some alum into the brine. Remove the outer layer from the stems, and put the stems into a new batch of brine.

• Change the brine every day and continue soaking the stems in brine until they are no longer bitter.

• Wash the stems with fresh water and soak them overnight in clear limewater.

• Wash the stems thoroughly and boil them for ten minutes.

• Make a syrup by stirring a sugar and water mixture as it comes to the boil. Make sure that it is not too sweet. Let the resulting syrup cool down.

• Warm some of the syrup until it is thin enough to work with and coat the boraphet stems with it. Leave the stems overnight. Keep adding a new layer of syrup every day for fifteen days. The once-bitter stems, now mild and sweet, are ready to eat.