2015 Varieta Tropica

The 2015 Tutti Fruti Freezer Leftover wine is down to 1.002 today so was moved to carboy.  Color is actually better than expected but I think will still be a very pale rosé when all is said and done.

I hope it doesn't overflow into the airlock too much

Emptying the Freezer

Today I undertook a New Year's Day Tutti Fruti wine. This wine is inspired by Ben Hardy, who annually on Christmas empties his freezer and ferments all of the leftovers with the expected results. I may go with a more pretentious name, however. Varieta Tropica sounds good perhaps.

I'm going for high volume of fruit for this 1 gallon batch.

• 4# 12oz strawberry guava
• 3# 15oz june plums
• 1# 14oz annona, combination of sugar apples and one cherimoya
• 5oz jaboticaba
• 5oz hibiscus sabdariffa flower candies
• handful of limeberries
• handful of phalsa berries
• 42g dried lemongrass (equivalent to 2000g fresh lemongrass)
• 2 quarts water
• 12oz white grape concentrate
• 1tsp pectic
• 1 Campden tab
• 1/4tsp Optiwhite
• 1/2tsp citric acid
• 6.5 ounces sugar

I boiled the lemongrass in 1 quart of water, strained the water into the primary, and repeated with the second quart of water.  Then I crushed all of the fruit and added to the primary, along with the Campden tab, grape concentrate.  

June plums have big seeds

Once cool, I added Optiwhite and pectic enzyme.  The initial pH was 3.56, adjusted to 3.48 with 1/2t citric.  The grape concentrate had lots of tartaric crystals, hopefully they don't dissolve and cause it to be too sharp.  The O.G. was a surprising 1.062, adjusted to an early 1.080 with just 6.5 ounces of sugar.  

We'll let this sit for 24 hours, then pitch QA23.  By throwing everything in, I have lots of seeds and skins and so my intent is to press this off early, maybe three days, and hope for the best.

New Year's Eve Experiments

Suzanne remarked that one does not generally use guests as guinea pigs when testing a new recipe.  I'm not sure whether it is fearlessness, foolishness, insensitivity, or malevolence, but I had no problem trying out 4 new recipes on Shawn and Suzanne on New Year's Eve.

The risk was reduced because we went with all appetizer recipes, and two of the four recipes came from my foodie friend Jim.  We started with a recipe from Jim which I later to be popular on the web, and a quickie, grape jelly-chili meatballs.  You whip together 2 12 ounce bottles chili sauce with a 32 ounce jar grape jelly, and dump it in the crockpot over 2 bags meatballs, frozen.  We split between two pots, one for veggie meatballs for Allie.

Next up two new recipes we found. Tiny Tomato Tarts use a pie crust filled with tomato-basil mixture and finished with a three cheese and mayo topping, baked in the oven.

Next Grapefruit-Squash-Goat Cheese flatbreads, adapted from here.  We tweaked by swapping the butternut squash for roasted beets.  This recipe was just OK, there wasn't enough sweet and salt to balance the acid in the grapefruit.  But not bad.

We finished with another favorite of Jim, Russian Cream Parfaits.  2 cups sour cream, 3/4 cup sugar, and a little vanilla whipped together and layered with fresh fruit.  I used blackberries and raspberries and topped with some grapefruit zest.

Delicious.  Happy New Year and Go Blue!