Strawberry Apple Rhubarb Jam

It’s strawberry season here, even though it’s hailing right now where I am. Grown in Queensland and shipped south. Today I bought 6 punnets for $10. Not quite market prices but pretty good for a supermarket. 4 punnets are now jam. I decided to use apples for the pectin, then looked out the window and saw some pickable rhubarb in my garden. A friend calls rhubarb “berry extender”. So that went in as well.

1kg strawberries, washed, hulled and roughly chopped
100g rhubarb washed and finely sliced. Could use more but this was what I had.
400g red gala apples (they were on special), washed, peeled and grated (discarded peel and cores)
4 ice disks lemon juice (~1/4 cup)
1/2 cup water
1kg sugar

Combine prepared fruit, lemon juice and water in a big pot. Bring to a simmer for long enough to soften the fruit. Stir in sugar. Heat gently until dissolved. Increase heat to a boil until set (about 25min today). I think it might be a soft set, which is fine. A bit hard to tell yet while it’s still hot. Love the colour though, which is a little deeper in reality than the picture shows.

Raspberry Apple Jelly

Quick notes for my reference. I had something under a kilo of good berries that I wanted to get out of the freezer.  I didn’t feel like making straight raspberry jam and jelly is easy, though messy to make. It turned out with good colour and flavour. Would have been even better if I hadn’t lost quite a bit of the raspberry liquid in a boil over. Bother.

~900g each raspberries and granny smith apples(washed and roughly chopped)
Put each to a different saucepan, almost cover with water, bring to boil, simmer until soft. Strain both through a jelly bag. This gave 1.5L liquid. Boil down for 30min to 1L. Turn off heat. Add ~900g sugar, stir and wait until dissolved. Bring back to boil for ~20min or until set is achieved. Bottle.

Damson Jam

I write many of my posts, food posts particularly, mostly as a sort of online journal for my own use. As in: “I know I’ve made raspberry jam before, how did I do it?”. It’s lovely bonus that other people seem to get some enjoyment from reading.

I picked another couple of kilos of slightly riper fruit this morning. I’ve made jam and 600g fruit is set aside (with a banana, covered in paper to ripen further) for tomorrow’s possible curd making experiment.

This is a basic jam, but it took ages due to the small size of the fruit and the stone removal step.

2.7kg whole fruit (minus 400g stones=2.3kg)
~100ml water
2kg sugar

Rinse and drain fruit. Remove stalks and any nasty looking bits. Cut a slit each plum to help the stones emerge. Weigh. Put in a large pot (I used my 7L stock pot) with a little water over a low heat. Stir fairly often, first until the fruit liquidises, then to keep it from sticking and burning on the bottom of the pot. Continue stewing until the stones start emerging. I tend to encourage this by squishing the reluctant fruit against the side of the pan. It would likely be less work if I were more patient. Lift the stones out with a spoon into a sieve set over a dish. I then rub what plum juice and pulp I can back into the pan, you could not bother if you’d rather. Weigh what you’ve removed so you can judge how much sugar to add. For this, a 2kg bag of sugar was ~0.85:1 ratio, which is about how I like to do jam. Convenient eh?

I then turn off the heat, stir the sugar in gently and leave to sit for up to an hour. This is both to let the sugar dissolve and for me to have a rest. Then bring the pot up to a rolling boil for about 10min or until a set is achieved on testing. Bottle in sterilised jars.

I’m thinking these aren’t wonderful quality damsons. They have many of the characteristics but I haven’t yet managed to ripen them to the lovely dark colour one sees in pictures. I expected more flavour too I suppose. I’d love to know what variety they are, but the tree is from the Flemings range and they don’t give any more information than “Damson”. I’ve left some fruit on the tree to see how it develops over the next week.  On the other hand, I’ve never met fruit I know to be damsons other than mine, only seen pictures and heard descriptions.

 

 

 

Raspberry Sauce and Jam

I reserved a kilo of locally grown raspberries months ago but only picked them up on Saturday. However, I’ve turned them into bottled things within 48hrs from then.

The sauce is a version of one I’ve made before. This is my first ever raspberry jam though. So I looked about for recipes. I’ve used bits from each of these two. The first one uses a neat trick of including a juiced lemon half in the mix until it’s come to the boil, for both flavour and pectin I suppose. The second precooks half the volume and puts that through a sieve to reduce the seed content. I’ve done both of these things, the latter for the sauce also. So this looks really fiddly, but a) I’m doing two recipes at once and b) you could omit the sieving part if you want.

Prep:
Take 500g raspberries, add juice of one lemon (reserve half the juiced lemon*) heat until mooshy, mash, boil/simmer 5min, push through a sieve.

Sauce:
Take half the resulting liquid, add half the remaining whole fruit(250g) and about a teaspoon more lemon juice. Heat until mooshy, mash. Add 250g sugar. Heat over low heat, stirring until sugar dissolved. Boil gently 5min. Bottle**.  This is wonderful on icecream, or pancakes, and many things I expect.

Jam:
Take the other half of the liquid and the rest of the whole fruit. Heat until mooshy, mash. Add the juiced lemon half and 450g sugar. Heat over low heat, stirring until sugar dissolved. Bring to a rolling boil until set. For me that was only 5-10min. Bottle**.

 

*which I put into the weighed sugar ready for the jam until I got up to cooking that. I don’t know if that had any effect or not.

**sterilised containers of course.

 

 

Blood Plum Fest

I said I wanted some plums to bulk out my teeny tiny crop of damsons. A friend of mine is in the process of selling her house and she offered me some of her last crop of mariposa plums. I offered to help her pick them. Ta da, a lovely time picking, chatting and meeting one of her other friends ensued and I got what turned out to be 9.4kg of plums to take home!

What few fruit my rather young damson tree offered up this year:

and the mariposa haul on a very different scale:

My first aim was to make another batch of the spicey plum sauce I like so much. It’s fabulous with sausages and coleslaw and I’m on my last bottle from the previous batch. It’s basically a ketchup type thing made from plums. The recipe I use is from Stephanie Alexander’s “Cooks companion”. Below is what I did, which is a slight change in method. However, her suggestion of stoning the plums first and using a bag for the stones is a much better plan. Passing the stewed fruit through a sieve gives a lovely texture but is a silly amount of work and my arm is hating me for it.

Spiced plum sauce

1.5kg plums (except I scaled the whole thing up for 2kg of plums)
1 1/2 tsp whole cloves
1 tsp whole allspice
1 tsp black peppercorns
2 1/4 cups brown sugar
2 tsp salt
1 tbsp minced fresh ginger (I cheated and used the stuff that comes in a jar)
3 cups cider vinegar
4 tiny hot chillis, seeded and chopped

Bring all to boil until plums collapse.
Pass through a sieve to remove stones and spices.
Boil uncovered until it thickens. Note it thickens further on cooling. (aiming for a bit thicker than regular tomato sauce).
Bottle in sterilised vessels.
Wait at least a month before using.

4 bottles of lovely dark plum sauce:

Erbowle is a medieval plum pudding thing. It is basically plums stewed in wine, passed through a sieve, sweetened with honey and flavoured with salt and spices (I used cinnamon, pepper, clove, nutmeg) all to taste. I made it on my recent trip while helping in the kitchen. It occurred to me a little later that I could make it, bottle it and preserve/”can” it by boiling in a water bath. So, I did, though I left out the rice flour thickening for fear it would catch in the water bath boil. Hopefully that separation will stir back in after opening.

This is a plum chutney I have made before. I made double the recipe and used half again as much sugar, for some crazy reason. Why? Silly me. Next time I’ll try to stick to recipe. It caught a bit towards the end of cooking. I really hope I didn’t burn it. I couldn’t taste burn, but there are so many other strong flavours. Fingers crossed.

I also made jam. I tend to think that plums need a bit of help in the flavour department to make a nice jam. I’ve used this this rather excellent spicy recipe before and it was lovely in a rather savoury kind of way, so I cooked it again. It makes a very dark jam because of the wine I suppose.

All the above recipes were done in 2kg batches. The remaining plums I stewed up with a little wine and sugar and froze in batches to eat with my breakfast. Yum.

Sadly, my arm now hates me. Boo. I have a huge list of things I want to do and all.

Apricot Jam 2017

The annual harvest from my friend’s apricot tree happened yesterday. There was much less fruit this year. It wasn’t netted, which is unusual but there seemed to be only modest attack by birds and bats, with no fruit at the top of the tree and very little fallen. We ate a very few (yum). Yield was only 4kg, including decent windfalls and usable sections from partially pecked fruit. There were a few under ripes left on the tree which I mean to collect in a few days. My theory is that perhaps the upper blossom was lost in high winds or storm? That happens in commercial orchards. For comparison, last year we got 15.5kg fruit off the same tree, and that was not a good year because we left it too late.

I decided that jam would take priority. So I’ve cooked 3kg up this morning. 1kg of gleaned and over ripe fruit has been packed into the freezer for later.

Recipe
3kg apricots, destoned and cut in 8ths
{kernels from 1kg
{pits from 1 lemon
{zest of one lemon
above tied in cloth
juice of two lemons
2.5kg sugar
very low heat until liquid
rest 1hr

bring to boil
remove stone bag
boil ~30min, stirring to avoid sticking.

This made 13 jars of apricot jam.

Differences from last year
-using my lump hammer as a tiny anvil for the kernel extraction process. This worked much better than just hammering the stones on wood as I’ve done in the past. One of the few kitchen jobs where safety glasses are well advised to be worn.
-less lemon pits, because I didn’t have any more. I had to boil it for longer to get a set which is likely related. I think I might have managed a better set than last year though? hard to tell until it’s fully cooled.
-The order of operation was a bit different prior to the boil. There was enough juice released before the rest to fluidise the mix but the sugar wasn’t all dissolved. Think I’ll go for just enough heat to dissolve the sugar next year and see if we avoid the foam discussed below.
-The strangest thing was that a remarkably stable foam appeared prior to boil being achieved. I’ve never had this before. I ended up needing to ladle the foam off to stop the pot overflowing.

A couple of hours later and there is still foam left. It looks like the foam one gets on the top of good fresh squeezed orange juice and the taste is reminiscent of that too. I’m considering popping out for some cream, mixing it up and freezing the result as an experiment?

And the jam of course. Labels have been printed but won’t be applied until the jars are properly cool.

Mulberry Jelly

An old post, slightly reworked.

This works wonderfully with cheese as well as on toast, scones etc. The apples provide the pectin and the long boil concentrates the flavour.

1kg mulberries- frozen and defrosted
1kg granny smith apples- roughly chopped. Leave the peel and seeds etc in.
sugar (see method for quantity)
juice of one lemon

Put each fruit to different saucepans. Barely cover with water. Boil each until soft. Strain through separate bags. combine equal volume of juice from each fruit (it was close enough, I used the lot). Add 2/3cup sugar for each cup of juice.(This worked out to 2.2L juice, I used 5cups sugar) Add juice of one lemon. Heat gently until sugar dissolved. Boil for 3/4 to 1hr or apparently until it starts spitting. I wasn’t aiming for a set but was aiming to repeat the excellent flavour of the not quite set sauce of a couple of years ago. However I seem to have a better set than last time, thank goodness I chose to put it in jars not bottles.

 

Apricot Jam

I’m still sick, so here are a couple more Apricot posts from this year’s crop and cooking. I confess the pictures are from previous years apricot adventures.

We left picking too late this year! When I arrived to check out the tree, the fruit left on the tree looked well ripe and lots of fruit was on the ground. We gleaned the salvageable fruit from the ground and I picked all the ripe fruit. There was a little left on the tree but only a very little. We stoned and bagged 8kg of clean fruit and 2kg of “less than wonderful but likely ok if well cooked” and sent all this to the freezer. I also took 5.5kg home. 3kg of mine are now jam. Most of the rest are also stoned and frozen.

Jam
3kg apricots, destoned and cut in 8ths
{kernels from 1kg
{pits from 3 lemons
{rind of one lemon above tied in cloth
juice of two lemons (10B’s lemonade lemons this year.)
very low heat until liquid and simmering add 2.5kg sugar, rest 1hr, bring to boil, remove stone bag (a few escaped, which I mostly fished out during the boil) boil ~20min, stirring to avoid sticking. This made 11 jars of apricot jam

I’m not doing Apricot brandy this year. I don’t like it enough to spend $30 or so on the needed brandy, especially when I’d rather have the brandy straight or available for hot chocolate. Must remember actually that apricot brandy is pretty darn good in hot chocolate. I still have some from previous years.

Strawberry jam

I went searching for the post from last time I made strawberry jam, but there wasn’t one. So this time there will be. Strawbs were 3 punnets for $4.

I pretty much followed Pam the Jam’s recipe. Except it would seem that English jam sugar is lots weaker than Jamsetta. I used about a quarter of a 50g packet of Jamsetta, plus  I boiled the peels and cores of three pears (from the pear compote I had just prepped) in about 100ml of water and strained off the liquid through a cloth. Otherwise this is 1kg of strawbs, 900g sugar, 100ml lemon juice and Pam’s method. Good colour eh?

Save