Appetites: What to make with fresh grapes (besides wine)

Chef Amy Thielen, author of "The New Midwestern Table," joined MPR's Tom Crann to talk about grapes.

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These days, we tend to think of grapes as supermarket perennials, rather than seasonal windfall. But like everything else, grapes taste their best in the fall, and the local grapes that are showing up in farmer's markets in August taste a lot more interesting than the seedless green globes that we snack on year round.

In the late summer, I try not to miss the boat on making them into something that lasts me into the winter.

Preserve

I like to make fresh grape juice, and grape jelly, and grape leather.

Sometimes, I can make all three of these things from a single picking. And I'll tell you how: I wash and stem the grapes and then put them in a huge, wide kettle for cooking — I use my copper jam pot — adding just an inch of water on the bottom. Cook until they split, about 15 minutes.

Then I pass the grapes through a food mill, which removes the seeds and skins. Then I pass this grape pulp through a fine sieve, which removes the pulp from the clear juice.

I measure the clear juice, and now I have options. For juice, I just add sugar to taste and bring it to a boil. For jelly, I add cup-for-cup measure of sugar, and boil it until it thickens and feels sticky when a droplet is pinched between my fingers.

I use the pulp to make leather. I sweeten that to taste with sugar, cooking enough to dissolve it, then spread the pulp thinly on parchment (or silpat) lined baking sheets, very thinly and evenly, and then bake that at 200 degrees until it turns pliable and I can pull it up from the paper, about six hours. That's the leather.

Eat them fresh

I like to roast clumps of them, on their stems, for a cheese plate garnish. You just rub them with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and roast them in an oven at 425 degrees for about 20 minutes, If you want don't want to eat the seeds, or politely discharge them, you can gently squeeze the grapes after roasting and they'll ooze right out.

These roasted grapes are wonderful with cheeses, especially the soft ones, like fresh goat cheese, but I also like to pluck the grapes off the stem and mix them with roasted beets and fresh ricotta. It's probably the most dramatic-looking salad I make, and it just screams fall.

With the dark red beets and grapes beneath mounds of bright white ricotta, this one looks best laid out on a shallow platter, which prevents any agitation between the reds and the whites as the salad is served. Though they taste great together, their mixture results in a violent pink that can be a little shocking. For my visual taste, it's best to keep them separated until they're actually on the fork.

That's why I like preserving. It's the challenge in it, the variables, that are so interesting.

And in this climate we need to keep the bold flavors of summer in the pantry to remind ourselves that summer wasn't just a dream — that it actually did happen.

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