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During my enforced incapacity my courgettes, as they do, turned into marrows. So, having an excess of marrows (well, one's an excess, really) I decided to test out the marrow stories. So I made four lots of marrow wine - two each using ordinary sugar and two each using demerara, and for each pair one with ginger and one without. Standard stuff, using one kilo of sugar per gallon. The results are interesting ...

For the plain sugar versions, the marrow-only wine tastes of precisely nothing. There's no discernible difference between this and alcoholic water. The marrow/ginger wine tastes vaguely of ginger, but not in a particularly pleasant way.

For the demerara versions, the marrow-only wine tastes of very little except demerara remnants. The marrow/ginger wine tastes vaguely like ginger cake - but only very vaguely and, again, not in a pleasant way.

OK - they're only two months old. But my experience tells me that there's nothing there which would improve with age, so I wouldn't consider wasting storage by allowing any of them to mature. Anyway, my point is that in none of the four wines has the marrow contributed anything - not even any discernible body.

On to test two, then. I took a half-pint of the marrow/demerara (no ginger) wine and dissolved six more ounces of demerara in it. It tasted sickly sweet and, as you would expect, the demerara flavour was much more pronounced. I then fortified it with a couple of slugs of vodka - and guess what? It tasted vaguely like sickly sweet but thin rum. I compared that with a shot of real rum, though, just to check my taste buds weren't fooling me. They were. The fortified wine, though certainly more rummy, was crap.

Conclusion - as I've often said before, those people who make marrow rum using the "Stuff a marrow with sugar and hang it till it rots" technique are fooling themselves. The marrow is irrelevant, and the only resulting flavour comes from unfermented demerara. Never again will I even look at a marrow in connection with winemaking. Actually, never again will I look at a marrow full stop.

Mike

Oh bugger, I was going to send you some of my mature courgettes.

How about cucumber wine, I've got a few of them as well ?

My Mum used to make me go round the neighbours with these zeppelin like monsters my Dad grew, sometimes I just used to leave them on the doorstep and run, they were such an embarrasment, everyone hated them. We used to eat them with gallons of white sauce in an attempt to use them up. No wonder I am now such a disturbed human being, marrowaphobia

or make these fried marrow burgers/patties.
grate marrow, salt it and squeeze out liquid using your hands. grate carrot and mix in. for every mug of veg add a tbs of plain flour and one stiffly whisked egg white. add herbs and salt and pepper and some sugar. fry patties of it in oil. You can add grated cheese too but they do make things stick to the pan. make chili mayonaisse with the egg yolks and that's that.
i like them.

I've stuffed marrows before now, quite successfully. As one veggie friend commented, "So that's how you stop a nut roast drying out - wrap a marrow round it!" Tomato sauce is also a worthwhile contribution to this meal. I can't honestly say the marrow contributes much to the flavour, but it has structural value.

I grew quite a few this year as the yield is so good. Totally sick of them; there's only so much marrow stew, curry, soup, pickle a person can take. Even the dogs hardly touch them any more.

Pig food. :-)

It may not make good wine but it does make lovely jam.

http://www.selfsufficientish.com/forum/ ... ow#p239487

Mike, don't you put any raisins in for body?

No, I didn't for the sake of the trial. The point was to examine whether or not a marrow does anything at all concerning any of the aspects of a wine, and the results have convinced me that it doesn't. Had I added raisins, I wouldn't have known if any of the body was contributed by the marrow.

The conclusion is that, as far as making anything alcoholic involving a marrow, it's a waste of time. For anything else, I'd also have said that it's a waste of a marrow, but then I'm into the semantic difficulties of deciding if, indeed, there can be any such thing as the waste of a marrow.

So, aspects of making wine from marrows - Flavour, nil: Body, nil: Colour, nil: Reduction of marrow population, good.

Now I know

Mike

MKG wrote: For anything else, I'd also have said that it's a waste of a marrow, but then I'm into the semantic difficulties of deciding if, indeed, there can be any such thing as the waste of a marrow.

Pigs like them. I've been giving runaway courgettes to a friend's pig and he goes wild for them. What nutritional value he gains from them I cannot say.

Point taken - pigs like marrows, and anything which aids in bacon production cannot be all bad. The question now arises - does feeding marrows to pigs affect the quality of the bacon? Ahhhh - will these puzzles never end?

Mike

EDIT: It's possibly a good challenge - 10 useful things to do with a marrow. References to politicians' bottoms are disallowed, on the grounds that the same could be said of almost anything.

MKG wrote: References to politicians' bottoms are disallowed, on the grounds that the same could be said of almost anything.

Quite so, otherwise if you did what you are inferring they would have nothing to talk out of.
Oh hang on ......