Making Membrillo

I only have a few photos of the membrillo that I made. One of the quince at the beginning, a big splatty pot and then a slab of membrillo at the end. As usual i got carried away with the cooking and forgot to take photos along the way.

We have a quince tree in our garden and this year we had our third harvest of about fifteen knobbly pears. Quince look like rotund freestyle pears and are very hard. They are not for eating raw and are difficult to peel but it’s well worth the effort in order to make delicious membrillo

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Membrillo is a set quince jelly that is eaten in Spain with cheese. The first time that I ate membrillo we were guests in a friends’ mother s house in the north of Spain. It was a small village near the Portuguese border and the mother welcomed us into her little house and made us a feast. The dessert was fresh white cheese and membrillo. The cheese didn’t look very appealing to me but it would have been rude to refuse. It was delicious,. Somehow the musky sweetness of the membrillo opened up the delights of this otherwise quite bland cheese.  I’ve been a fan ever since although these days I usually enjoy membrillo with Manchego, which is a hard Spanish sheep cheese.

It’s very easy to make membrillo but as I only make it once a year I can never remember quite how I made it the year before.  Here’s this years version

Peel and chop the quince  – however many you have.

Put the chopped quince into a saucepan and just cover with water.

Split a vanilla pod and scrape the seeds onto the fruit and then chuck the pod in too.

Cook for about forty minutes, or until the quince are tender.

Strain, remove the vanilla pod and weight the fruit,

Blend the fruit to a puree in a processor

Put the puree into a clean saucepan with the equal weight of sugar .

Gently bring to the boil, then turn to simmer for about forty minutes.

Stir every few minutes and beware of moulten plops of membrillo.

Pour the jelly onto a tray lined with parchment paper and leave to set

My kitchen was totally trashed when I had finished, there were blobs of membrillo far and wide but it was well worth a little scrub.