rosehips

[emmac]

Any good recipes? drinks? I'm never making rosehip syrup again after losing my will to live last year. Also sugar free?

[Brewforagegrow]

You and your lack of sugar!

How about a leather, mix probably 50/50with crab or cooking apples, sweeten with honey.

Or dry them out, pass through a sieve to remove the hairs and use to make tea?

Or just pretend you're a kid again and stick the seeds down people's shirts as an itching powder

[Brewforagegrow]

You could also try some type of cordial, I'd guess hot (not boiling) water to extract the flavour and again sweeten with honey

[cab]

Can't imagine making it without suger, other than just replacing with some honey.

iirc isn't there a Swedish savoury rose hip soup recipe?

[emmac]

Good ideas. wondering how much via c is destroyed by cooking it?

might blend some with stewed elderberries and honey!

[Brewforagegrow]

Savoury soup recipe is in Roger Phillips Wild Food from memory, you're right cab.

I think that heat vastly reduces the amount of vitamin c Emma which is why I suggested hot, not boiling water.

[foragingmouse]

Have you tried removing the seeds and drying the flesh and using it in seed bars ? Jappenese rose are naturally sweeter as the dog/feild rose are more tarte a mix of both is a good balance ,
I have made leather without any sugar but hips need to be mixed with something, really ripe pear works well with hips but due to the sugar not being present to preserve the fruit drying can not be done naturally , you will need a dehydrator or a fan assisted oven with the door wedged open . The sugar thing isn't new primitive man didn't have it 

[Brewforagegrow]

I'd assume they also didn't have a dehydrator or fan assisted oven though

[foragingmouse]

I have a book that has reference to smoke curing fruit pulp much like cambium blocks and the native tribes of the states

[cab]

Sept 26, 2014 15:14:35 GMT Brewforagegrow said:

Savoury soup recipe is in Roger Phillips Wild Food from memory, you're right cab.

I think that heat vastly reduces the amount of vitamin c Emma which is why I suggested hot, not boiling water.

Oh, cooking to a syrup does destroy some vitamin C - but like making jam, once you've lost some at the start what you're left with is still pretty bloody good as a way of preserving vitamins. From memory, a UN report on fruit and nutrition said that such methods save about half of the vitamin C, which is better than eating fruit thats un-preserved but getting a bit old. 

[cab]

Sept 27, 2014 14:17:55 GMT Brewforagegrow said:

I'd assume they also didn't have a dehydrator or fan assisted oven though

Or an average life-span appreciatively over 40. Being primitive man sucked.

[Brewforagegrow]

Sept 27, 2014 16:07:45 GMT cab said:

Sept 27, 2014 14:17:55 GMT Brewforagegrow said:

I'd assume they also didn't have a dehydrator or fan assisted oven though

Or an average life-span appreciatively over 40. Being primitive man sucked.

Very good point. In fact Emma, eat sugar, it can drastically extend your life expectancy

[foragingmouse]

Average age hmm , hunter gatherer communities that are more modern and living day to day on a similar diet to primitive man actually have longer life than modern man the short life expectancy of early man was hugely affected by external factors not diet , such as lack of medical knowledge , weather conditions and the fact they were not the top of the food chain

I know I wasn't made for modern life hairy fingers sloping forehead and a periodic mad craving for raw liver. stig of the dump is my hero

[emmac]

I love this topic. Primitive cultures (what does that even mean? By all intents and purposes we are the primitives) may not have lived as long but they were a darn sight healthier

[cab]

Healthier than the average person in the Western world who partakes of no physical exercise at all? Yeah, maybe. The capacity to use various food preservation methods to avoid starvation (which -will- kill you if you succumb) and swap it for food poisoning (which -might- kill you if you succumb) does tend to mean that the survivors are stronger!

But that doesn't mean that ignoring the simple biochemistry of how food preservation is traditionally done is good for us - whether its using sugar or salt and relying on osmosis or if you're going a step further and ensuring that the right microbial community predominates (e.g. use of saltpetre, or by lactic acid bacteria fermenting), the traditional methodologies we have for food preservation tend to be kick-ass for keeping us safe. If you go back to first principles of how bacteria grow, what they need, and what makes essential vitamins break down in food, you'll struggle to come up with better methods.

And ultimately, we're not hunter gatherers - such nomadic peoples tend to have relatively simple (typically osmotic) means for preserving food. Once communities start becoming settled the nature of food contamination changes rather, and the kinds of food preservation become more complex.

imho its wise to avoid taking in TOO MUCH sugar, and certainly wise not to eat nothing but tasty salted things. But if your prime sugar intake is in fresh food and in preserved foodstuffs, its really quite hard to over-do the sugar. Or, in other words, I'd be more worried about the cake than the jam filling