Rumtopf

You’ll find lots of recipes for Rumtopf on the internet and I’m not quite sure why I am adding another one, other than to ‘spread the love’.

Rumtopf is just another way of bottling the abundance of summer fruit and preserve them for winter. The twist is: preservation is achieved with 54% rum, rather than boiling and sealing.

Making Rumtopf is a long process: it starts with the first of the summer fruit and finishes with the harvest of late plums, raspberries and blackberries.

You need a large kilner jar (2-3 L), sugar and rum (preferably 54%, but 40% will do), and seasonal fruit.

Do this

Carefully clean the jar and rubber seal, rinse with very hot water and dry.

Start with the earliest soft fruit, in the UK that’ll probably be strawberries. As the season progresses, add red currants, black currents, apricots, cherries, blackberries, raspberries, plums…

For each layer of fruit, take only firm, best quality fruit that is ripe, but not overly ripe.

Weigh the fruit and weigh out half the weight of the fruit in sugar. Mix fruit and sugar and let stand for an hour.

Add the fruit/sugar mix to the jar and add enough rum to cover the fruit completely – adding about a finger breadth on top.

Keep doing this with more fruit and sugar until you filled the jar, then leave to stand in a dark, cool place for several weeks.

Eat and drink on its own. Enjoy it over ice cream, with some creme fraiche or yoghurt.