10.13.2011

Jam you!!!!!

Yum
The Kraken Plum

Peach Bourbon

Ma Doudou Pear

Grape Clove

Raspberry Blackberry


Here is a reminder of what we started with.
Too much fruit, as you may recall.

The thing with canning is that it used to be an all day party time event.  Women would all get together, bring a bunch of harvested fruit and can away til the wee hours.  Or they would spend 10 years birthing 6 or 7 female children and then use them as child labor (I think that may have been my mom's plan for a while).  Both ways are super fun.  Party with your friends...or party with your kids.  Or party with both while the menfolk are out killing things.  Anyhow, this bounty up top, too much for two people to do on a Friday eve.

Canning can be done in small batches, which is what my next two canning adventures were.

Eight pints of berries made about five 8oz jars of jam.

Some canning points:
Canning preserves food two ways.  Creating a vacuum seal that keeps airborne pathogens out.  Creating a state of acidity that keeps bacteria from growing.

Sugar in jams is used mostly for body.  A lot of the recipes you find in books have tons of sugar in them because we have a terrible sweet tooth in this country.  Hence Adult Onset Diabetes changing it's name to Type II Diabetes (no longer just for adults!).  That said, you can usually cut the sugar in a recipe to taste.  Just note that you may end up with a soupier jam.

One thing you cannot adjust in a recipe is acid.  Some fruits are very low acid.  Therefore acid needs to be added to them. Lemon or lime juice is the easiest way to do this.  It doesn't really affect flavor, so don't freak out.  If you want it to affect the flavor, you may want to add some zest to your batch.

Pectin is naturally occurring in fruits.  It is usually most concentrated near the skin and in just ripe fruit.  Pectin levels drop as fruit peaks and becomes overripe.  I did not have any luck with adding pectin to my jelly.  You don't need to add pectin to jams.  You almost always need to add pectin to achieve a jelly state.

My third batch of jam was pears.  They were underripe and created more of a conserve than a jam.  I added a little banana vanilla rum to them.  Delicious.

The pears made around three 16oz jars and eight 8 oz jars.

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New York

New York
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