Gleaning Quince

Most people don't have any idea what Quince are. While gathering some large apple crates to use as raised beds here at 5'Primal Farms, I was shown a Quince tree.  Its fruit have dropped to the ground and have rotted into compost for several years now.  I did a little research and found that Quince have many uses and come in many varieties.  There are some great websites with recipes and cooking instructions for quince. I found some YouTube videos as well.

Quince are high in pectin.  Pectin is the stuff that makes jams and jellies thicken and gel.  Often in the past, quince has been added to apples and pears to make them thicken better while making pies and other such stuff.  I also found instructions in an old cookbook of mine for extracting the pectin for use as a gelling agent with other fruits and berries.  I will scan and upload that info at a later date after I give it a try.

This week, we were given permission to glean the Quince tree.  Below are the Still shots from our glean.  I will follow these gleaning posts with photos and recipes on the In The Kitchen page of this blog in a couple of weeks.  Quince store long term in a cool, dry place.

As you will see in the video of the Quince glean, we put all the rotting fruit into a seperate bucket.  We also cleaned up the grounded apples around the trees near by.  After the glean, I took the rotting fruit to Cook Pigs Ranch just outside of town to be fed to their happy, muddy, outside pigs.  You can check out Cook Pig Ranch at www.cookpigs.com.

Here is a link to a wonderful article on Quince I found while researching this interesting fruit. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120288799