Call it what you will, but with the weeks passing so quickly, the all-too-short period when veg like asparagus and Jersey Royals are in season and at their best will soon be over. If only we were able to enjoy them for more of the year, without them having been flown over from the other side of the world... Well hold on to your horses for a minute, because maybe we can. Yep, you guessed it - both asparagus and Jersey Royals are available all year round from a tinned food aisle near you. Could they be as good as the fresh produce currently brightening up the displays of markets (whether of the super- or farmers' variety) up and down the country? Almost certainly not, but I was damned if I wasn't going to give them a try.
First up, the Jersey Royals, available in neat little 300g tins from Tesco. Just like Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano and good old Melton Mowbray pork pies, Jersey Royals are covered by a PDO or Protected Designation of Origin under the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. In other words, only potatoes that have been produced and processed in Jersey can be labelled and sold as Jersey Royals, and indeed the tin bears the PDO logo, so these must be the real deal. The main photo on the label also shows the potatoes in the skins for which Jersey Royals are renowned - although fragile and papery, they are usually left on (partly as they're very flavoursome themselves, but also as peeling the little things would be a right old faff).
It's surprising and somewhat of a shame then to open the tin and find the completely naked potatoes within. Surely the skins shouldn't be shown on the label, therefore? Look again though, and there on the black rectangle bearing the name of the product are three much smaller, skinless potatoes. Sneaky. But why go to all the trouble of peeling the potatoes? Maybe the skins wouldn't have survived the canning process very well. Tasting one straight from the tin, I'm not convinced the spuds themselves have either. The texture is not so much waxy (as Jersey Royals should be) as it is soapy. Thankfully they don't taste like that too, but nor do they taste of very much at all. That lovely nutty flavour you get with fresh Jerseys isn't detectable here at all. A couple of them seem to have some dark patches as well, which doesn't make them look very appetising - so far, so disappointing. Will the asparagus fare better?
The tin itself promises much - just look at the size of it compared to the potato tin! I've never seen one of such dimensions before; tall and narrow, it is as if it has been designed specially to encase the long, slender stems of of the vegetable. But my excitement quickly dissipates on opening - the spears of asparagus lurk beneath the surface of their brine in an almost sinister way, reminiscent of some kind of plantlife growing in that pond your parents always warned you to stay away from as a child, for fear that if you fell in you would get caught up in the weeds and never get out again, pulled down and drowned in the murky depths of the water. The smell that immediately hits you is quite off-putting too - a strange, vegetal funk, somewhere between overcooked cabbage and, well, the whiff you get when you've been eating asparagus and then go to the loo an hour or two later. Maybe whatever chemical process it is that causes this in our bodies has already started to happen in the tin.
Putting aside pleasant thoughts like that for now, it's actually quite difficult getting a spear out to try; the cooking and canning process has left the tops of the spears particularly fragile, and a couple of them just turn to mush between my fingers as I try to pull them out of the tin. Towards the base of the stems they are a little firmer, but holding them from that end the spears droop pathetically, having been allowed to go way past the 'just tender' point at which they would usually be served.
That said, the taste is actually not bad at all - indeed it seems even more intense and asparagus-y than fresh. Given their almost comical flaccidity though, attempting to dip the spears into a hollandaise or simply melted better seems pointless. I think the spears would work quite well chopped up in a risotto, which calls for the flavour of the vegetable much more than it does the texture, but having a little puff pastry leftover from my steak bake experiment, I decide instead to go for a simple but very tasty asparagus tart recipe from the wonderful Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries II , which I tried once before with the fresh vegetable.
A border is scored with a knife on a rectangle of the pastry, within which a mixture of creme fraiche and grated parmesan is spread, and the spears laid neatly on top with a grating of lemon zest. The border gets a brushing of egg or milk, then the whole thing is baked for 15-20mins at 200 degrees, by which time the exposed pastry is nicely browned and puffed up, and the filling has set into a kind of quichey-custard.
I give the jersey royals a quick heating in a pan with some wild garlic butter - for which I did the foraging myself. I appreciate that sounds like something your typical foodie blogger would say to show off their "fresh, local, seasonal" credentials, but don't worry - I actually picked the wild garlic and made it over a year ago, and have had a sausage of it sat in my freezer ever since, so it probably isn't at its best now either, but it still makes the potatoes a lot tastier.
With a bit of salad on the side, it makes for an enjoyable dinner. The crisp pastry and creamy filling are quite rich, but this is nicely offset by the lighter, clean taste of the asparagus and the zing of the lemon zest. Another excellent recipe from good old Nige - well worth a try, whatever asparagus you have to hand. Done this way, I'm not even entirely sure you'd guess the vegetable had come from a tin, though I do get only the faintest hint of an 'asparagus wee' smell later - so perhaps a true aficionado could work it out from that. But there's nothing quite like lovely, lightly steamed asparagus, which the tinned stuff can't come close to - so make the most of the taste (and smell, if you like) of that for a final couple of weeks while it is in the shops and in season. And then stock up on tinned to see you through to next spring.
It's surprising and somewhat of a shame then to open the tin and find the completely naked potatoes within. Surely the skins shouldn't be shown on the label, therefore? Look again though, and there on the black rectangle bearing the name of the product are three much smaller, skinless potatoes. Sneaky. But why go to all the trouble of peeling the potatoes? Maybe the skins wouldn't have survived the canning process very well. Tasting one straight from the tin, I'm not convinced the spuds themselves have either. The texture is not so much waxy (as Jersey Royals should be) as it is soapy. Thankfully they don't taste like that too, but nor do they taste of very much at all. That lovely nutty flavour you get with fresh Jerseys isn't detectable here at all. A couple of them seem to have some dark patches as well, which doesn't make them look very appetising - so far, so disappointing. Will the asparagus fare better?The tin itself promises much - just look at the size of it compared to the potato tin! I've never seen one of such dimensions before; tall and narrow, it is as if it has been designed specially to encase the long, slender stems of of the vegetable. But my excitement quickly dissipates on opening - the spears of asparagus lurk beneath the surface of their brine in an almost sinister way, reminiscent of some kind of plantlife growing in that pond your parents always warned you to stay away from as a child, for fear that if you fell in you would get caught up in the weeds and never get out again, pulled down and drowned in the murky depths of the water. The smell that immediately hits you is quite off-putting too - a strange, vegetal funk, somewhere between overcooked cabbage and, well, the whiff you get when you've been eating asparagus and then go to the loo an hour or two later. Maybe whatever chemical process it is that causes this in our bodies has already started to happen in the tin.Putting aside pleasant thoughts like that for now, it's actually quite difficult getting a spear out to try; the cooking and canning process has left the tops of the spears particularly fragile, and a couple of them just turn to mush between my fingers as I try to pull them out of the tin. Towards the base of the stems they are a little firmer, but holding them from that end the spears droop pathetically, having been allowed to go way past the 'just tender' point at which they would usually be served.That said, the taste is actually not bad at all - indeed it seems even more intense and asparagus-y than fresh. Given their almost comical flaccidity though, attempting to dip the spears into a hollandaise or simply melted better seems pointless. I think the spears would work quite well chopped up in a risotto, which calls for the flavour of the vegetable much more than it does the texture, but having a little puff pastry leftover from my steak bake experiment, I decide instead to go for a simple but very tasty asparagus tart recipe from the wonderful Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries II , which I tried once before with the fresh vegetable.
A border is scored with a knife on a rectangle of the pastry, within which a mixture of creme fraiche and grated parmesan is spread, and the spears laid neatly on top with a grating of lemon zest. The border gets a brushing of egg or milk, then the whole thing is baked for 15-20mins at 200 degrees, by which time the exposed pastry is nicely browned and puffed up, and the filling has set into a kind of quichey-custard.
I give the jersey royals a quick heating in a pan with some wild garlic butter - for which I did the foraging myself. I appreciate that sounds like something your typical foodie blogger would say to show off their "fresh, local, seasonal" credentials, but don't worry - I actually picked the wild garlic and made it over a year ago, and have had a sausage of it sat in my freezer ever since, so it probably isn't at its best now either, but it still makes the potatoes a lot tastier.
With a bit of salad on the side, it makes for an enjoyable dinner. The crisp pastry and creamy filling are quite rich, but this is nicely offset by the lighter, clean taste of the asparagus and the zing of the lemon zest. Another excellent recipe from good old Nige - well worth a try, whatever asparagus you have to hand. Done this way, I'm not even entirely sure you'd guess the vegetable had come from a tin, though I do get only the faintest hint of an 'asparagus wee' smell later - so perhaps a true aficionado could work it out from that. But there's nothing quite like lovely, lightly steamed asparagus, which the tinned stuff can't come close to - so make the most of the taste (and smell, if you like) of that for a final couple of weeks while it is in the shops and in season. And then stock up on tinned to see you through to next spring.
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