PSA: large batches of quince paste

this likely applies to other fruit preserves, too, but quince paste (or your preferred regional name/variant) is what I make big batches of.

long story short: big batches require big, wide pots.

I’ve been making quince paste for years. close to twenty at this point. the volume has slowly been increasing as my quince trees have become more numerous and matured. no problem. turned out great for years. until I had enough quince that I started trying larger batches to use them up in a timely fashion. not huge batches, mind you. initially in the vicinity of six to eight pounds of fruit. this year it’s been ten to twelve pounds.

I started having trouble getting the paste to set up. authors of internet recipes generally advise their readers whose paste doesn’t set to return it to a pot and reduce it some more. or to put it in an oven or dehydrator for long hours at low temperatures. I tried those options, which sort of worked. I often ended up with something closer to fruit leather: nearly black, varying degrees of chewy. pretty tasty, but not what I actually wanted.

so I spent some time trying to learn more about pectin. I asked friends and family, but nobody had any ideas I hadn’t already tried. looked around the internet and read, in at least 18 barely different ways, what anybody who ever made any kind of jam or jelly already knows: that three things were important to get right—sugar, pH, water content. I briefly explored getting a kitchen pH meter (which I may still do at some point), but only got as far as adding a lot of citrus juice to see if lower pH would do the trick. tasted nice, but didn’t help anything set.

I found some suggestions that unripe quinces might have more pectin, so I tried using unripe quinces. no go.

I reverted to the sickly sweet 1:1 fruit:sugar ratio. no help.

I tried using a pressure cooker to get the fruit soft enough without adding much water to keep water content low. when that didn’t work, I tried baking. ended up having to add water to get it to puree. and still no set.

I read a couple jam set failure troubleshooting guides that included warnings not to scale up recipes, but there wasn’t much information about why. that got me thinking, though. I had been filling my pots nearly full of quince puree. I was minimizing the ratio of free surface area to volume, which substantially increased the amount of time it took to evaporate an adequate fraction of water. not quite an answer yet, but getting closer.

it occurred to me that heat might also be a factor, so I looked into that. I didn’t have a whole lot of luck on that count, which I suspect is at least partly due to the wild proliferation of AI generated garbage websites. I did finally find one mention that heat does degrade pectin starting around 212°F and accelerating at higher temperatures. so my hours of simmering to evaporate water from deep pots of puree may have been enough to destroy a lot of the copious pectin I started with.

at this point, a friend suggested that I revert to a small batch to test my theory. instead, I bought a shallow 15-quart brazing pan from the local restaurant supply place, which gives a whole lot more free surface area to evaporate more quickly. very much an impulse purchase, and it cost more than I care to reflect on.

but it worked! only took an hour and a half or so to reduce instead of six. set up as soon as it cooled off, maybe two hours. got a nice translucent orange color instead of something that resembled congealed blood. great texture. cut the sugar down a fair amount, so it tastes the way I like and tempers fears of dental caries and insulin disorders.

I can think of at least one alternative way to solve my problem without the brazing pan. simmering un-puréed quince in a little water with the sugar already added instead of simmering after it’s already puréed would likely work in one of the smaller and deeper pots I already had.

What is PSA?  I asked google though he didn't know either!!!

public service announcement

tel jetson wrote:
I can think of at least one alternative way to solve my problem without the brazing pan. simmering un-puréed quince in a little water with the sugar already added instead of simmering after it’s already puréed would likely work in one of the smaller and deeper pots I already had.

I prefer quince jelly to quince paste and simmer the washed, halved unpeeled quinces in a crock pot covered with water overnight and strain off the fruit to make jelly using 40% sugar to volume of liquid.

The pulp is not wasted, I feed it to the chickens.

Occasionally, I make a quince butter, again with reduced sugar, that can be eaten the same way as paste, just more spreadable and less sweet.

Have you tried slow baking washed, halved quinces in a a light syrup with cinnamon and cloves, covered with foil at about 100C overnight?

I then carefully slip off the skins, remove the cores and transfer to a wide mouth jar, top with syrup and water bath for 20mins.

They can also be frozen.

The cooked quinces can be sliced and added to apple pies and or drained and used in baking.

There are also a number of middle eastern recipes cooking quinces with lamb and/or goat.

The quinces trees at the community garden are in full flower at the moment so fingers crossed for a good harvest.

How do you mostly use your quinces?

Megan Palmer wrote:
How do you mostly use your quinces?

a large majority ends up as quince paste. after giving away easily 3/4 of what I made last year, I still had a couple small blocks of it left at the end of August this year. I’m hoping and expecting to make it all the way through with a little to spare this time around.

the next highest volume is jelly and jam that my mom and sister make. they’re good at it and don’t seem to have had the same problems with setting that I had with paste. a few years ago they did make one batch of jelly that set up much too solid. didn’t quite have to saw it out of the jars, but care was required to not bend any spoons involved.

one of the several reasons I prefer quince paste over jam and jelly is that I don’t need to keep track of or have space for jars. I cut the paste into blocks, wrap them in wax paper, and pack them in boxes that take up much less room than jars and aren’t prone to breaking. I also don’t think twice about replacing wax paper when I give it away. I’m not such a miser that I won’t give a jar away, but I’m on track to make in the vicinity of 150 pounds of quince paste this year. that would be a lot of jars.

other than that, I bake or poach a few every couple days while they last. nice as is with a spoon, or with a little cultured cream. I’m more partial to spicing with cardamom and star anise, but cinnamon is good, too.

my girlfriend uses some for soup, most recently with butternut squash.

then a variety of other miscellaneous foods. pizza, cakes/pies/puddings, Persian-ish stew, curry, oat porridge, whatever random idea I come across or think of come supper time (or any mealtime, really). they obviously sub for apples and pears pretty well in desserts and salads, but also for potatoes in savory dishes.