quinces baked and frozen

a special treat:

Baked and frozen quinces. Own photo.

It's quince season and my little tree has produced a record harvest of around 80 kg, so I have quinces on my mind quite a bit. I've given away just under half the load to around seven people via freegle and I think I now have the rest reasonably well under control. I've spread out the quinces on four pallets in an unheated space so I can use them up through the winter without too many of them starting to rot.

One full pallet like this is between 15 and 20 kg of quinces, so this ia less than a quarter of the harvest in this photo. Own photo.

Way back when I started using a complex recipe for a baked quince dessert, with sweet wine (vin santo), cinnamon and cloves and whathaveyou (by Rowley Leigh in the Guardian in 1997, before the start of their current website), and over the years I simplified it more and more, such that now I just cut the quinces in quarters (or eighth if they are huge), cut out the core, wipe them off with a quarter of a lemon, and bake them at 170 deg (fan oven) for just under an hour, rotating the tray by 180 deg after half an hour, also turning the quince wedges in the corners as they tend to burn quite quickly. If I have untreated lemons, I also add shavings of the peel before baking.

These days I like to eat them cold, with some half-defrosted blackberries, and I've also discovered that they can be frozen - as they naturally have the texture of a fruit sorbet, they come out of the freezer as a quince sorbet snack you can eat with your fingers (see photo at the top). That's my desserts sorted through to February ...

One tray like this takes around 600 - 700 g of cored and quartered quinces, after baking they're reduced to just over half the weight. Own photo.

Will have to work on my food photography skills. Also, revive the quince tag, which I hadn't used in the last 15 years ...