Orange Mead

Ingredients:

• 1.8Kg of honey

• 4.5l boiled water

• 4 large oranges

• 1 tsp mead yeast

  Method:

Orange Mead

Put half the honey into a clean, sterile bucket with the juice and rind of the oranges. Pour in the boiling water and stir until the honey is dissolved. When the liquid has cooled to room temperature, add the yeast. Leave to ferment for 2 days.

Strain the liquid through a clean muslin into a demijohn, fit with an airlock and leave to ferment for a further 5 days.

Syphon the mead into a clean demijohn, leaving behind any sediment. Add the rest of the honey and mix well. When fermentation ends (when bubbles pass through the airlock at less than one a minute) siphon the mead into bottles and cork.

Age for a minimum of 3 months before drinking.

Marinated Fruit

Ingredients:

• A mix of fruits (berries, apples, pears etc)

• Mead or wine

• Honey

Method:

Wash your fruits and slice and core any apples or pears.

Pour over enough mead or wine to cover the fruit and stir in 1 tablespoon of honey for every 3 cups of liquid.

Leave to stew for a minimum of 24 hours before serving.

You can reserve the mead or wine for drinking. Mead flavoured with fruit is known as a melomel.

Elderberry Mead

To the Saxons and the Danes the elder tree was sacred, thought to contain a spirit or Goddess. To take a part of a tree would require gaining permission from the spirit or Goddess, lest she take revenge on the offending person.

It was thought that if you burned elder wood you would see the Devil, but if you planted elder by your house it would keep the Devil away. Elder trees were the sources of many coloured dyes; Blue and purple from the berries; yellow and green from the leaves; grey and black from the bark.

Most of the Elder tree is poisonous, containing high levels of cyanide.

Ingredients:

• 1500g elderberries 

• 4.5l/19 cups boiling water 

• 1.5 kg/4.5 cups honey 

• 5g/1 tsp pectic enzyme 

• 5g/1 tsp of red wine yeast 

• 5g/1 tsp yeast nutrient 

Method:

Put all the berries into a large bucket and crush with a rolling pin. Add the honey, and pectic enzyme and cover with the boiling water. Stir well.

Once cool, make a note of your gravity.

Add your yeast and nutrient and cover loosely for 1 week before straining into a demijohn with an airlock.

When fermentation ends (bubbles passing through the airlock at less than one a minute) check your final gravity.

Finally, syphon the wine into bottles and cork.

Age for a minimum of 6 months before drinking, but a year is better.

Gammon Cooked In Mead

Ingredients:

• Gammon

• Teaspoon of mustard seeds

• Teaspoon of black pepper

• Bottle of mead (or 2)

Method:

Place the gammon in a pan with the mustard and pepper.

Cover with mead and bring to the boil and simmer for an hour and a half. Top up the liquid with More mead or water, if necessary, to keep the gammon fully covered.

Pour away the liquid (or use it as a base for making gravy) and let the gammon rest for 10 minutes before serving.

Mussels

Ingredients:

• Mussels

• 1/2 a pint of mead

• 250ml Cream

• 4 Spring onions (finely chopped)

Method:

Discard any open mussels that don’t close when you tap them.

Mix together the mead and the cream. Stir in the onions.

Bring this to a boil and add the Mussels. Cover and leave to cook for 2 minutes.

Remove the cover and shake or stir. When all the mussels have opened they are ready.

Taken from my book ‘Eat like a Viking!’ Available now on Amazon

Pot roasted lamb shank

Ingredients:

• 2 lamb shanks

• Butter

• 1 onion (peeled)

• 2 turnips

• 2 white carrots or parsnips

• 2 sticks of celery

• 1 tablespoon honey

• 100 ml mead

• 1 tablespoon flour

• 1 litre beef stock

• 2 bay leaves

• 2 teaspoons black peppercorns (crushed)

Method:

Melt some butter in a large skillet or frying pan. Add the lamb shanks and sear them for 10-15 minutes. Leave to one side

Melt some butter in a large casserole dish or cauldron. Chop the onions, Turnips, carrots/parsnips, and celery and add to the dish. Add the honey, mix well and cook for 10 minutes.

Stir in the mead, flour, peppercorns & bay, followed gradually by the beef stock. Bring to a simmer.

Add the lamb to the dish and cook, covered if possible, for 2.5- 3 hours or until the lamb is falling off the bones.

Meadowsweet mead

Check my other blog post here for the basics of homebrewing before attempting this one.

Ingredients:

• 1.8Kg honey

• 30g meadowsweet

• 4.5 l water

• 1 teaspoon of wine yeast

Method:

Put half the honey into a clean, sterile bucket with the meadowsweet.

Pour in 4.5 litres of boiled water and stir until the honey is dissolved.

When the liquid has cooled to room temperature, add the yeast. Leave to ferment for 2 days.

Strain the liquid through a clean muslin into a demijohn, fit with an airlock and leave to ferment for a further 5 days.

Syphon the mead into a clean demijohn, leaving behind any sediment.

Add the rest of the honey and mix well.

When fermentation ends (bubbles passing through the airlock at less than one a minute) siphon the mead into bottles and cork.

Age for a minimum of 3 months before drinking.

Taken from my book ‘Eat like a Viking!’ Available now on Amazon 

Braggot

Take a look at my older post on the basics of homebrewing if you are new to the subject here

Ingredients:

• 30g hops

• 1362g honey

• 500g amber malt extract

• 12 pints water

• 1 teaspoon Wine yeast

Method:
Put the hops into a large pan and cover with 6 pints of water, boil for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile put your honey and malt extract into a large, sterilised bucket or fermentation bin. Strain the hop water through a muslin cloth into the fermentation bin.

Stir well to dissolve all the honey and malt extract. Pour in 6 pints of cold water and stir.

Check your gravity, it should be around 1060. If not you can adjust up or down by adding more honey or water, as necessary. This should give you a braggot around 7.8%.

Add your yeast and leave to ferment for 2 to 3 weeks.

Don’t forget to check your final gravity, if you haven’t already and want to know the percentage of alcohol in your brew.

Sterilise your bottles.

Add a ½ teaspoon of honey to each bottle and siphon the beer into the bottles. Cap the bottles (or use swing tops) and place somewhere warm for 2 days before moving to somewhere cool.The braggot should be ready to drink in 2 weeks, 3 is better.

Taken from my book ‘Eat like a Viking!’ Available on Amazon now

Getting started with homebrew

The first rule of making any kind of brew, is to make sure you sterilise everything. Buckets, bottles, siphons – everything that comes into contact with your brew. You can buy sterilising powder in home-brew shops, Wilko’s or online. Follow the directions on the packet and clean everything thoroughly.

Once clean, rinse the equipment well.

The next thing is to make sure you have a hydrometer. These are cheap to buy and will help you to know when your brew is finished fermenting. It will also enable you to estimate the alcohol content of your finished brew.

• Take a reading before you add your yeast. This is known as the Original gravity or OG

• Take another at the end. This is known as the Final gravity or FG

• Using a simple formula, (OG – FG) x 0.13 = %, you can then figure out the alcohol content of your finished brew

• For example if your original gravity is 1080 and your final gravity is 1000, then using the formula (1080 – 1000) x 0.13 = 10.4% alcohol content

The original gravity of most wines and meads should start at around 1050 – 1100

The original gravity for beer should start at around 1040

The higher the number, the higher the potential alcohol content of your brew, however this is also limited by the type of yeast used.

Your brew will either finish fermenting when the yeast runs out of food (sugar) or when the alcohol content is too high for the yeast to live in.

When your brew stops bubbling, or slows to less than 1 bubble a minute, use the hydrometer to see if your brew is finished fermenting. Move your brew somewhere warm and check the gravity over a period of 3 days and if the reading doesn’t change, fermentation has stopped.

At this stage there are a few optional things you can add to your brew. The first 2 things are fermentation stopper, and campden tablets. These are generally added at the same time to wine, mead and cider, and help to stabilise the alcohol by killing off any yeast that might still be hanging around. They also help to prevent any bacterial growth during the ageing process. Add these as per the packet instructions, usually you’ll need to stir your brew daily for 3 days after adding, which will also help to remove any trapped co2.

The next thing is bentonite. This is a naturally occurring clay that draws particles from the alcohol and settles it to the bottom of your container. This clears the alcohol, so you can siphon your liquid into a new container or bottle to prevent a hazy wine.

Taken from my book ‘Eat like a Viking!’ Available now on Amazon 

Apple & Mead cake

Ingredients:

• 150g Butter

• 150g honey

• 2 eggs

• 225g plain flour (sifted)

• 1 level tsp baking powder (sifted)

• ½ tsp salt

• 70 ml mead

• ½ a dessert apple, sliced into thin wedges

• 1 ½ tsp of demerara sugar

• ½ tsp of cinnamon

Method:

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius.

Beat the butter, honey & eggs together in a bowl. Add the flour, baking powder, salt & mead. Mix well.

Spoon into a 7½ inch round cake tin and arrange the apple slices in a circle on top of the cake. Mix the sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over the top of the cake mix.

Cook for 40 - 45 minutes in the centre of the oven. Cover with greaseproof paper if it starts to brown too quickly.

Drizzle with a little honey and leave to cool for 15 minutes before slicing. The cake will continue to cook during this time.