Flower power: meet Britain's only rosewater makers :rose2:
Rosewater is a venerable British ingredient – but it’s the popularity of Middle Eastern cuisine that has thrust it back into the spotlight
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...1_3353502b.jpg
Desdemona Freeman picks her roses
By Xanthe Clay1:47PM BST 25 Jun 2015
The bleating of sheep floated across the field, a cockerel crowed and the morning birdsong filled the Welsh valley. I was in a field surrounded by fragrant pink roses, delicate blooms at the peak of their curved-petal loveliness. My task: to spot the best ones and yank their flowery heads off.
This may sound like an act of floral vandalism, but I was there to help Desdemona Freeman turn her roses into something that, to the cook at least, is even lovelier. Freeman, with her business partner Denise Jones, makes the country’s only home-produced rosewater, under the name Petals of the Valley.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...e_3353505b.jpg
Desdemona (l) and Xanthe (r)
The British have used rosewater in food for centuries. Until the introduction of vanilla in the 17th century, it was our preferred flavouring, cropping up in both sweet dishes such as taffety tart (thinly sliced apples on pastry, glazed with a rosewater icing) and savoury ones such as chewits (minced meat pies). Constance Spry’s classic 1956 cookbook lists rose jelly, rose petal jam and rose petal vinegar. But soon after, rosiness fell out of favour with cooks, surviving only in granny’s favourite chocolate-covered rose and violet creams.
Until now. Roses and rosewater have been appearing back on the menu recently, driven by the interest in Middle Eastern food and the exertions of writers including Yotam Ottolenghi and the Honey & Co chefs Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer; they also crop up on the ingredients lists of grown-up soft drinks such as Luscombe’s elegant Damascene Rose Bubbly.
:rose2:
Making rosewater is no bed of roses, though, explained Freeman, a school administrator with a background in marketing, thrusting the rose heads into food-safe plastic bags. She starts at 5.15am – before the insects invade or the heat of the day burns off the volatile fragrance – and picks for up to two hours, bagging up to 2kg of flowers. There are no days off, either. The roses have to be harvested daily during the flowering season, from the end of May to mid-July, “because you’ve got to pick the roses on the day the bud bursts, because that means it has the most rose oil in it”.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...2_3353500c.jpg
Freeman and Jones distil their rosewater only once
Rose oil is the perfumer’s gold, the best selling for tens of thousand of pounds a litre, and rosewater is just a by-product of the lucrative process of making that oil. But Freeman is turning the process on its head, by making the finest rosewater her sole objective.
“I started with six plants my mother gave me for my birthday and the idea of making organic oil for skin care,” she said. An unusual goal, but Freeman is the daughter of Duncan Vaughan-Arbuckle, the founder of the London wine museum Vinopolis, and admits to having a “good nose”, presumably both for fragrance (vinous or otherwise) and a business opportunity.
:rose2:
The plan quickly foundered. Barely half an acre of the proposed 17-acre rose farm was planted, but it soon became apparent that even at full capacity they would not produce a meaningful amount of oil.
All was not lost, however. Freeman and Jones had already bought a small still, and set to distilling the roses. “The water was so fabulous that we thought, why worry about the oil?” And the Welsh process is a little different from overseas producers’. Usually, after distillation, the rose oil floats to the top of the water to be skimmed off, while the water is redistilled, sometimes several times, to harvest every scrap of oil. Only then is the rosewater sent for bottling.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...2_3353503b.jpg
Desdemona starts her day at 5.15am
In contrast, Freeman and Jones distil only once, and by careful regulation of the process they can keep all the oil suspended in the water – meaning that their rosewater has four times as much rose oil content as even good-quality competitors’. Plus, Freeman added, “A lot of the rosewaters you buy are just water with a bit of rose oil added, or with synthetic flavourings, and it invariably comes from mixed origins. Ours is single estate.”
I wanted to see how this distilling process worked, so we headed for the still, housed in one of the farm outbuildings. The apparatus had an exotic look about it, despite coming via Scotland, all shiny beaten copper with a pot-bellied pan the size of a big tea urn. Freeman packed the rose heads in to it, supplementing with roses from the previous day, stored in the freezer – there are just two distillations a week, producing around 1,000 100ml bottles in total, and it takes 1kg roses to make a litre of rosewater.
:rose2:
A gush of the farm’s borehole water from a hose, and the Arabian-style onion-shaped lid went on to the still. Freeman lit the gas ring under the pot to heat the rose broth to boiling point. The steam, she explained, would force its way through the pipe at the top of the onion lid. From there it would rush down a coiled pipe through a pan of water cold enough to condense the steam back into water, and trickle out of a spout ready to be collected.
Sure enough, a cup of tea and a tour of the garden later, the water was trickling through – rosewater. Well, almost. Fresh rosewater, it turns out, smells oddly vegetal. It needs to be stored in the demijohn for six weeks for the full fragrance to develop. Not too much of a wait, to come up smelling of roses.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddr...o-with-it.html
