![]() You can either do this in the oven – place the leaves on a baking tray and dry in an oven preheated to 100C fan until they start to curl and the veins golden – or in a dehydrator (55C for 90 minutes). Dried fig leaves – This is a good way of preserving the leaves so you can use them throughout the year.Keep in the fridge and use in cocktails, drizzle over ice cream and pancakes and use in salad dressings – try these ideas for fig leaf syrup. Once cool it’s ready to bottle into a sterilised jar. Be careful as the syrup takes a long time to cool. Remove the leaves once the flavour is as intense as you’d like it. Throw in four or five fig leaves and allow them to infuse until the syrup tastes as you’d like. Place the mix in a saucepan and heat until the sugar melts, stirring. Fig leaf syrup – Mix sugar and water to a ratio of 50:50.So, now is the time to grab any remaining small, dark green leaves and have a go at some of these culinary delights… If your tree is anything like mine the fig leaves are dropping rapidly. Serve the preserved figs with platters of cheese and biscuits – try my recipe for preserved green figs.īack to the leaves – they’re astonishingly versatile and can be used as long as they cling to the tree. Pick them, scrub them, soak them, boil them and bottle them in a sugar syrup and you will have jars of unctuously sweet treats throughout the year. Let’s start with the figs themselves, most trees will still be holding onto dark green, walnut sized fruits that didn’t make it to fruition earlier in the year. This year the harvest amounted to the grand total of zero fruits. I’m going to put this down to a lack of fig wasps earlier in the year and the weather – not only did the temperatures fluctuate but so did moisture levels, which meant there wasn’t the sustained heat to ripen them or to allow the smaller ones to grow.īut, all is not lost – you can use both the leaves and unripened fruit to wondrous effect in the kitchen – it’s the perfect time to preserve some of that goodness so you can continue enjoying it throughout the winter months. In an average year we would normally harvest hundreds of sweet, juicy figs from three mature trees in the garden. Long gone are the ripe, gooey, indulgent fruits and now, we’re left with the leaves and fruits too small to ripen. I kid you not.Įven now, as the garden and all the plants that have sustained us over the summer months start to die back or hibernate, the fig tree reminds us that we can still make use of it. If you didn’t already know, fig leaves carry an intense coconut scent and flavour. ![]() ![]() On a potter through the garden I passed one of the fig trees and caught the most wonderful scent. The sun is out and it’s a gloriously beautiful day.
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