We’ve covered tepache a couple of times here, first in my post about it and then in our first Back to Basics video class. You can get up to speed on this easy, flexible, and damn delicious Mexican beverage that’s traditionally made with pineapple skins and cores as a way of extracting a ton of flavor from the parts of a fruit that don’t make good eating. When I use pineapple to make tepache, I generally compost the depleted peels after I decant the drink—though I often use them again to make another batch, adding other fruit scraps to boost the flavor. Frugality first!
During the growing season here, however, I’ve got lots of great local fruit to work with, including in my very own garden. Right now both raspberries and blackberries are putting out lots of fruit every day, so I’ve been using them to flavor and color my weekly tepaches. I’m also a notorious hoarder of citrus peels, especially Mandarin orange, because they dry beautifully and have great flavor (they’re known as chenpi in China, where they’re used both medicinally and culinarily).
My last few batches have mostly been raspberry and mandarin peel, with a few blackberries (they’re not as prolific), cranberries from the freezer, apple and pear cores, the occasional lackluster plum, and sweet herbs like mint and anise hyssop. Because these mixtures don’t contain any inedibly tough parts (if you pit the plums and remove the stems and seeds from the pears before dropping them in the jar, for example) it occurred to me that I could divert all of the solids in a tasty direction, skipping the compost altogether.
This mixture included raspberries, blackberries, cranberries (all muddled before adding to break them apart for better extraction), a pear core, half a plum, and mandarin peel. After their week fermenting on the counter, everything was soggy and starting to smell pretty acetic, but I tasted some after straining and it still had a lot of flavor to offer. So I coarsely chopped everything (mostly to break the peels up into small pieces) and put everything into a saucepan with a generous pour of honey.
I set that to simmer, and got a bunch of spices together: clove, cardamom, hot pepper (I used the fermented chile flakes), mustard, fennel, and some candied ginger (which I chopped into small pieces). I was working with about a quart/liter of chutney, and probably used between 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon of a given spice. You don’t need a lot unless you like a lot. These all went in the pot, along with a diced onion. Note that if you leave alliums out, your chutney/jam will be dessert-friendly. Adding alliums means that you’re pretty committed to a savory outcome. I didn’t add any vinegar, because the fruit was already nice and sour.
As it simmered and the flavors began to marry, I tasted the mixture periodically. It needed a bit more honey to balance its strong acidity, and a little bit of salt since it had none. I let it simmer and reduce and turn into a thick, sticky concoction that checks all the chutney boxes: sweet, sour, hot, complex, and addictive. It’s going to crush on everything from cheese sandwiches to roast pork.
Fun fact: “chutney” comes from the Hindustani/Urdu root “chatna” meaning “to lick” or “to eat with relish.” It’s a root shared by “chaat,” a word covering a wide range of South Asian street food and snacks. I love etymology.
So if you’re making a fruit ferment like tepache, and you curate your fruit selection so that it’s uncontaminated by pits, seeds, stems, or other inedible bits, consider the solid byproducts as fertile territory for chutneying. You can and should adjust the spice mixture according to your taste, or in keeping with the requirements of a traditional condiment (like, say, mango pickle). You could also use this fermented fruit mash as the basis for a pretty amazing fruitcake (citrus and cranberries practically scream holidays) or all kinds of pie/tart/pastry fillings if you omit the alliums. Sorbet could be another interesting sweet direction to go.