Carrot Jam, and Carrot Bread

Every week we pick up a box of scraps from the greengrocer, essentially saving some of the stuff they've got going to waste from ending up in the bin, to give to our hens to keep their diets interesting and fun. It's also great for getting good, tasty eggs with dark orange yolks, you want your hens to have lots of greens in their diets. But we get all sorts in there and sometimes we end up with an excess of something that we'll struggle to get the chickens to eat. This week it was carrots.

Carrot jam (bottom), and bread (toasted, top)

Now they will eat carrots if we cook them first, otherwise they're not fond. So I ended up filling a jam pan up with cleaned, chopped carrots and cooked them until tender, giving a huge bowl full to the girls and saving some more for us. 

I happened upon a recipe for carrot jam in the style of apricot, originally from Mrs. Beetons book of Household Management, replicated by Jane Grigson in her (wonderful) work "Good Things". I've adapted that just slightly, and I'll share that recipe below.

After making the jam I still had pulped carrots left, so I thought bugger it, and tossed it in to bread. I'm delighted I did, it's also delicious. 

Without further ado, the recipes.

Carrot Jam in the Style of Apricot

You will need:

Carrots
To every 1lb (450g) of pulped carrots allow 1lb (450g) of sugar
Juice of 2 lemons (or 1 large lemon)
Zest of 1 lemon
6 chopped almonds
2 tablespoons of brandy
1 drop of almond essence

First, kill your carrots. Scrub them clean, slice them, and cover with water in a large pan. Simmer them until they're soft - like bad school dinner soft. Strain and reserve the water, that'll be invaluable as the basis for making soup later.

Now pulp the carrots, whether by mashing them and putting them through a sieve (old school) or sticking a wand blender in, get them fully pureed. You'll have a pan full of the orangest goo you've ever seen.

Weigh your pulp and add sugar in the ratio described above in the recipe - essentially the same weight of carrot pulp as sugar. Sterilise some jars (clean them, pour boiling water in them and over the lids, pour it out and place them in an oven at 105-110C until you need them). Now boil the carrot and sugar mixture, get it to a full boil and keep stirring while you boil it for around 5 minutes. Now take it from the heat.

Add a mix containing the lemon juice, zest, brandy, chopped or ground up almonds and drop of almond extract, and stir it in fast. Pour this into your sterilised jars and seal tightly. This isn't a jam that'll last years but with the sugar, brandy and lemon it will keep for a while. Let it cool, serve as a breakfast jam or in the middle of cakes. It's quite delicious.

Carrot Bread

You will need:

3 teaspoons of instant fast acting yeast
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of bread improver or vitamin c powder (optional)
3 cups of bread flour
Approximately 2/4 cup of water
1/3 cup cooking oil
1 cup of carrot pulp (see above)
1 tablespoon of sugar

You know how to make bread dough. Add your instant yeast (or your chosen option for yeast, pre-activated if you wish) to the bread flour (I used 2 cups of malted wholegrain and 1 cup of white), with the salt, sugar (to get the yeast going), oil, carrot, bread improver (if you think your flour might need it), and water. Work it all into a dough, adjusting with more or less water as required (this is a variable, I don't know how wet your carrots are!) and kneed it for 5-10 minutes or so, until the dough is good and stretchy. Alternatively drop it all into a bread machine and put it on the dough cycle.

Let it rest until doubled in size, knock it back, and form it into loaves. Leave it to rise again until doubled in size and then bake it at 200C for 28 minutes, and it sounds hollow when tapped on the base. I cooked mine in silicone loaf moulds but it'll be fine as a bloomer or even as bread buns (then you'll have to cook them hotter, say 220C, for less time - about 12 minutes, if you make this into a dozen buns). Let it cool on a wire rack to set up what bread makers call a crumb, and you're done. 

This is a very savoury bread - with butter it's slightly carroty, it's very orange, but with the carrot jam it's quite delightful.