Great information here in the comments, so thanks! Yes the Food in Jars books are great. For really basic stuff we still use the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. Our favorite jam is thimbleberry. One to one sugar. No pectin. This year was dry so a little added water helped.
You are all experts, and I am a happy novice. I can eat rubbery jam just fine. Most turn out great. Not setting? Boil longer! If it refuses to set? Drink it as a cordial, or add as a syrup to ice cream or yogurt. There are literally no losses :) Chutneys are great fun too :) I made a garlic strawberry concoction, simply because I had scapes at the same time as a proliferation of berries. Right now, everything is peach and blackberry!
I cracked up reading your mishaps. Been there, done that. Everyone has given great advice on what to do next time. As to the messed up stuff:
Too liquid: Of course syrup. Put in mead or wine. Add some to a fruit/wine reduction for meat. Cocktails. Tart filling. Add to BBQ sauce.
Too firm: Make into jammy bits. Use in scones, muffins, sweet breads. Add as a sweet note to salads. King Arthur actually sells “jammy” bits.
We grow/forage our own fruit. We have friends in other states that grow the fruit we cannot so everything I make is from tree ripe fruit so it is awful when it doesn’t turn out.
Rather than do all jams/jellies I have started to make chutney and my new favorite, conserves! I only do small batches 6 - 7 jelly jars as 2 people can’t eat that much. If it is a really good recipe (peach/hazelnut conserve was awesome) I make it again to give as gifts.
Have fun with the process and enjoy the “failures” as it stretches your imagination as what you can do with it.
1. weigh your fruit 2. calculate 60 - 75% sugar by weight 3. Cut & sugar the fruit, let macerate overnight 4. Quickly bring all fruit & sugar to a boil. 5. Turn off and let sit overnight. 6. Prepare your jars 7. use the widest, heaviest, non reactive pan you own, rinse w cold water*. 8. Fill pan no more than 2" deep. Insert mercury thermometer. 9. Stirring regularly, bring to a hard boil, cook to 217-220. 10. Fill jars, clean and cover. Process or not. I do not. Fruit that is big and 'wet' (overwatered) have a hard time setting, smaller tighter fruit have more concentrated flavor/pectin/fiber. Best tasting jams/preserves come from the least amount of heating times - small batches. If you cook a large pot of jam to 220 the scent and flavor compounds are compromised and frequently the sugar will take on a 'flavor' not carmalized exactly.... long cooking deadens the fruit taste. For very low pectin fruit (raspberries, peaches) I'll use a jelly bag of cranberries or meyer lemon membranes (saved from marm making in Dec frozen) cooked in the first cooking and squeezed into the pot before final cook. For some this is too much work but I prefer spreading the work over a few evenings esp when it is hot. My jam is good, soft set and I sell about 50 cases a year for the past 15 years. "It Starts With The Fruit' Jordan Champagne/Happy Girl Kitchen is an excellent book.
Ashley's tip on watching the bubbles going from foamy to glossy is a great tip. It's what my Mother and Grandmother used as an indicator also. When I was smart enough to listen to them, they let me stir and watch the cooking fruit and let them know when the foam changed. Tips like this are all about experience and feel. When fruits aren't consistent with pectin or sugar you have to know when it looks right.
It can help to think of jam- and preserve-making as a chemistry project. Sugar, pectin and acids all serve a purpose in making the product. Recipes that say things like "two tablespoons of X per ounce of Y" are often based on average sugar and acidity of the fruit(s), with big margins of error. So you get some variation in product results, depending on ripeness, variety, weather, etc.
Most people prioritize what matters to them about the final product, then tweak things - but because you work with wild products, you're probably always going to have some variation unless you go the route of measuring brix, acidity, etc. in each batch. Personally I really enjoy rolling with it when things don't go as planned, because it's how I learn - and frankly, having a reproducible outcome isn't that important to me as long as it meets certain basics (e.g., not very sweet, fruit forward).
You might try some Google Scholar searches for research pubs - that's where I would head next, rather than cookbooks.
As for the overly sweet rosehip syrup, you could use it as a poaching liquid for other fruit or to candy peels; as simple for mocktail/cocktail development; as the liquid for hot-packed canned fruit (it would be beautiful with peaches, probably); or further reduce it and make throat-coat style candies with some additional citric acid, eucalyptus, etc.
Holy moly, I just learned SO much from this comment thread, I am thrilled.
I have had the same problems with recipes for jams & preserves being wildly all over the map, and the only two that I can reliably make are quince paste and wild blackberry jam with fennel blossoms. I hate overly-sweet jams, and with wild blackberries I have always been able to get away with a ratio of 2:3 sugar to berries + the juice of 2 fat lemons + a tablespoon of lemon zest. (Toss washed berries in pot with sugar + lemon juice + zest + handful of chopped wild fennel flowers, simmer - stirring frequently - until you can see the bottom of the pot like Moses parting the Red Sea when you move the spoon through, add another tablespoon chopped fennel flowers, jar according to preference.) Since wild fennel blooms in California right when the berries ripen, this jam basically feels to me like NorCal summer in a jar, and I love it in no small part because it's utterly unfussy, but it is a radically loose recipe and I'd feel like a shit for wasting berries figuring it out if there wasn't such a ridiculous abundance of blackberries every summer. I am excited to try the actual resources shared here to up my jam game for all the things I DON'T want to waste.
I'm by no means an expert jelly maker here in MN, but for the past few years our wild plum and raspberry crop has *forced* me to try. I've found Mrs. Wage's fruit pectin and the instructions inside nearly foolproof. I will say, my hot pepper plum jelly has quite an enthusiastic following!
At this point, I more or less make jam for a living, and it is tricky. It's even trickier to write about because there are a lot of implicit assumptions about what "set" is, as everyone's preferences are really different, and what getting there looks like.
Some people like "jam" that's basically a fruit compote with minimal sugar that pours out of the jar, other's like 2x as much sugar as fruit that's only got a vague shadow of the original fruit flavor, and is basically just a fruit colored candy in a jar. Some like it hard and chippable (believe it or not) and other's like syrup that they call jam...making recipes hard to decipher as the end goal of the writer isn't always clear.
You'd think your goal would be everyone's goal... of spreadable on toast, not so much sugar that you break your teeth, but not so little that it tries to pretend it's healthy... Anyhow, here's some help getting there:
For no pectin jams, when you've made a dozen successful batches or so, you'll be able to see when they reach the set point just by looking at the bubbles in the pot. They change from a foamy bubble to a glossy bubble as it hits 220ish, and they way they move in the pot changes. If you keep on it, you're really observant, and I'm sure you'll see it. It's not always actually 220, and some set as low as 216 and some as high as 224, so the thermometer is just a guideline.
When working with pectin, each type actually makes something with a really different texture. The best, and most like what it sounds like you're going for is Sure Jel Low Sugar (pink box). It sets dependably and with a great texture no matter what you do with sugar, and even if you're making a full sugar jelly with something like chokecherries, the texture is better than the full sugar stuff.
Pomona's pectin makes something that's more like a chippable jello than a jam/jelly. You can cut it with a knife, and when you try to spread it, it shatters into chunks on your toast. Their recipes always call for too much, and even when you use less, it crumbles instead of spreads. But...it does dependably set kinda no matter what, that's why people like it.
Liquid pectin makes a very loose set jelly that is thick-ish, but still pours off a spoon. It requires astronomical amounts of sugar (7 cups sugar to 4 cups liquid) to set, and only makes a set that's just a bit firmer than what that sugar would accomplish alone in a thick syrup. People like it for pepper jellies that are poured over cream cheese, or for saving jellies that didn't set, because it's the only pectin you can add after you put the sugar in.
(Generally, the pectin has to dissolve and "bloom" in the juice at a boil for a minute or two before you add the sugar, and if it doesn't, you get syrup. So once you have a failed jelly that already has sugar in there, you can't try to re-cook it with regular pectin, but you can with liquid pectin.)
As to pectin contents of wild fruits, most are pretty variable. I've made no pectin chokecherry jelly from the fruits around here dependably for years, never had a failed set, even harvesting from bushes all over the state...but reading comments, it seems like they're not always high enough in pectin everywhere to get that same result.
My favorite wild fruit jam/jelly is with barberries. They're really amazing, at least from the bushes we have around here and the flavor is really complex and delicious. At this point, I've worked with most the wild fruits we have around here, so if there's one in particular you're trying to work on, let me know.
Hopefully this is in some way helpful to you. I really love your work Hank, and I'm sure you're going to come up with some killer jams =)
What a tremendously interesting/helpful post! The acid component I suspect is the culprit for non set. I'm working 60# of green gage plums today and I'm going to test for acid... so interesting! Thank You!
Wow! Such great detail, thank you so much! FWIW, I am using commercial pectin from apples, from Cuisine Tech. It's a powder, and is what my pastry chef friends use. Barberries? There are a lot of berries with that name. Do you know that Latin? Vaccinium, yes? Again, thanks so much for this.
Good on you Hank. Get yourself a copy of the Edmonds Sure to Rise cookbook from New Zealand. Jams (& to a lesser extent jellies) have been a rite of passage for housewives for decades here. Sadly that is no longer the case. I'm in about the same boat as you, although I've just had success with a barberry jelly: subtle and not over sweet, and my fingers are now healed! I've heard you can also do a basic pectin test, look it up, as wild fruits & berries will always differ from orchard grown. I used the temperature as setting guide for that jelly but I've also had that fail for jams. All the best.
I've made hundreds, probably well over a thousand jars of jam and jelly over the past 15 years and was a master food preserver through the University of CA Cooperative Extension. That said, we make what we like, and we don't like the level of sugar in recipes that use normal commercial pectin or the old fashioned, no pectin added recipes. Too sweet and it diminishes the flavor of the fruit. My one exception is marmalade, and it's an art getting good at those. We use the Ball low or no sugar pectin and their recipes exclusively. And I use 50-75% more sugar than the max indicated in their recipes. It helps up keep the sweetness where we like it, and the pectin is flexible enough to handle it. No Splenda ever!
I’m on the same arc but have been lucky thus far. The books I’ve found are hard to love. They tend towards measurements given in volume only or in a mix between volume and weight and they often try too hard to be innovative. Basically cannot decide what they are.
The best one I’ve found so far is The Art Of Preserving by Emma McDonald (bought at least three others before that and passed on to the thrift store). It has some stuff in it not useful to me but also solid recipes and instructions.
Just made a version of her raspberry jam and it worked both flavor wise as well as set well. I like my jam on the harder set side of things and found hers perfect. Doing her citrus baseline recipe this week.
Really good, and now having gone through all of that and having at least a few Jars of Jelly or Jam done right use some of these as a base for glazes for grilled doves or ducks and you'll be glad you did!
Great information here in the comments, so thanks! Yes the Food in Jars books are great. For really basic stuff we still use the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. Our favorite jam is thimbleberry. One to one sugar. No pectin. This year was dry so a little added water helped.
You are all experts, and I am a happy novice. I can eat rubbery jam just fine. Most turn out great. Not setting? Boil longer! If it refuses to set? Drink it as a cordial, or add as a syrup to ice cream or yogurt. There are literally no losses :) Chutneys are great fun too :) I made a garlic strawberry concoction, simply because I had scapes at the same time as a proliferation of berries. Right now, everything is peach and blackberry!
I cracked up reading your mishaps. Been there, done that. Everyone has given great advice on what to do next time. As to the messed up stuff:
Too liquid: Of course syrup. Put in mead or wine. Add some to a fruit/wine reduction for meat. Cocktails. Tart filling. Add to BBQ sauce.
Too firm: Make into jammy bits. Use in scones, muffins, sweet breads. Add as a sweet note to salads. King Arthur actually sells “jammy” bits.
We grow/forage our own fruit. We have friends in other states that grow the fruit we cannot so everything I make is from tree ripe fruit so it is awful when it doesn’t turn out.
Rather than do all jams/jellies I have started to make chutney and my new favorite, conserves! I only do small batches 6 - 7 jelly jars as 2 people can’t eat that much. If it is a really good recipe (peach/hazelnut conserve was awesome) I make it again to give as gifts.
Have fun with the process and enjoy the “failures” as it stretches your imagination as what you can do with it.
It’s the people. Learn with and under Alan or a local’s in person jamming session.
1. weigh your fruit 2. calculate 60 - 75% sugar by weight 3. Cut & sugar the fruit, let macerate overnight 4. Quickly bring all fruit & sugar to a boil. 5. Turn off and let sit overnight. 6. Prepare your jars 7. use the widest, heaviest, non reactive pan you own, rinse w cold water*. 8. Fill pan no more than 2" deep. Insert mercury thermometer. 9. Stirring regularly, bring to a hard boil, cook to 217-220. 10. Fill jars, clean and cover. Process or not. I do not. Fruit that is big and 'wet' (overwatered) have a hard time setting, smaller tighter fruit have more concentrated flavor/pectin/fiber. Best tasting jams/preserves come from the least amount of heating times - small batches. If you cook a large pot of jam to 220 the scent and flavor compounds are compromised and frequently the sugar will take on a 'flavor' not carmalized exactly.... long cooking deadens the fruit taste. For very low pectin fruit (raspberries, peaches) I'll use a jelly bag of cranberries or meyer lemon membranes (saved from marm making in Dec frozen) cooked in the first cooking and squeezed into the pot before final cook. For some this is too much work but I prefer spreading the work over a few evenings esp when it is hot. My jam is good, soft set and I sell about 50 cases a year for the past 15 years. "It Starts With The Fruit' Jordan Champagne/Happy Girl Kitchen is an excellent book.
Hank,
Ashley's tip on watching the bubbles going from foamy to glossy is a great tip. It's what my Mother and Grandmother used as an indicator also. When I was smart enough to listen to them, they let me stir and watch the cooking fruit and let them know when the foam changed. Tips like this are all about experience and feel. When fruits aren't consistent with pectin or sugar you have to know when it looks right.
Good luck and have fun!
It can help to think of jam- and preserve-making as a chemistry project. Sugar, pectin and acids all serve a purpose in making the product. Recipes that say things like "two tablespoons of X per ounce of Y" are often based on average sugar and acidity of the fruit(s), with big margins of error. So you get some variation in product results, depending on ripeness, variety, weather, etc.
Most people prioritize what matters to them about the final product, then tweak things - but because you work with wild products, you're probably always going to have some variation unless you go the route of measuring brix, acidity, etc. in each batch. Personally I really enjoy rolling with it when things don't go as planned, because it's how I learn - and frankly, having a reproducible outcome isn't that important to me as long as it meets certain basics (e.g., not very sweet, fruit forward).
You might try some Google Scholar searches for research pubs - that's where I would head next, rather than cookbooks.
As for the overly sweet rosehip syrup, you could use it as a poaching liquid for other fruit or to candy peels; as simple for mocktail/cocktail development; as the liquid for hot-packed canned fruit (it would be beautiful with peaches, probably); or further reduce it and make throat-coat style candies with some additional citric acid, eucalyptus, etc.
Anyway, hope you enjoy!
Holy moly, I just learned SO much from this comment thread, I am thrilled.
I have had the same problems with recipes for jams & preserves being wildly all over the map, and the only two that I can reliably make are quince paste and wild blackberry jam with fennel blossoms. I hate overly-sweet jams, and with wild blackberries I have always been able to get away with a ratio of 2:3 sugar to berries + the juice of 2 fat lemons + a tablespoon of lemon zest. (Toss washed berries in pot with sugar + lemon juice + zest + handful of chopped wild fennel flowers, simmer - stirring frequently - until you can see the bottom of the pot like Moses parting the Red Sea when you move the spoon through, add another tablespoon chopped fennel flowers, jar according to preference.) Since wild fennel blooms in California right when the berries ripen, this jam basically feels to me like NorCal summer in a jar, and I love it in no small part because it's utterly unfussy, but it is a radically loose recipe and I'd feel like a shit for wasting berries figuring it out if there wasn't such a ridiculous abundance of blackberries every summer. I am excited to try the actual resources shared here to up my jam game for all the things I DON'T want to waste.
Hank-
I'm by no means an expert jelly maker here in MN, but for the past few years our wild plum and raspberry crop has *forced* me to try. I've found Mrs. Wage's fruit pectin and the instructions inside nearly foolproof. I will say, my hot pepper plum jelly has quite an enthusiastic following!
This is why I stick with freezer jam. So far so good.
Hey Hank,
At this point, I more or less make jam for a living, and it is tricky. It's even trickier to write about because there are a lot of implicit assumptions about what "set" is, as everyone's preferences are really different, and what getting there looks like.
Some people like "jam" that's basically a fruit compote with minimal sugar that pours out of the jar, other's like 2x as much sugar as fruit that's only got a vague shadow of the original fruit flavor, and is basically just a fruit colored candy in a jar. Some like it hard and chippable (believe it or not) and other's like syrup that they call jam...making recipes hard to decipher as the end goal of the writer isn't always clear.
You'd think your goal would be everyone's goal... of spreadable on toast, not so much sugar that you break your teeth, but not so little that it tries to pretend it's healthy... Anyhow, here's some help getting there:
For no pectin jams, when you've made a dozen successful batches or so, you'll be able to see when they reach the set point just by looking at the bubbles in the pot. They change from a foamy bubble to a glossy bubble as it hits 220ish, and they way they move in the pot changes. If you keep on it, you're really observant, and I'm sure you'll see it. It's not always actually 220, and some set as low as 216 and some as high as 224, so the thermometer is just a guideline.
When working with pectin, each type actually makes something with a really different texture. The best, and most like what it sounds like you're going for is Sure Jel Low Sugar (pink box). It sets dependably and with a great texture no matter what you do with sugar, and even if you're making a full sugar jelly with something like chokecherries, the texture is better than the full sugar stuff.
Pomona's pectin makes something that's more like a chippable jello than a jam/jelly. You can cut it with a knife, and when you try to spread it, it shatters into chunks on your toast. Their recipes always call for too much, and even when you use less, it crumbles instead of spreads. But...it does dependably set kinda no matter what, that's why people like it.
Liquid pectin makes a very loose set jelly that is thick-ish, but still pours off a spoon. It requires astronomical amounts of sugar (7 cups sugar to 4 cups liquid) to set, and only makes a set that's just a bit firmer than what that sugar would accomplish alone in a thick syrup. People like it for pepper jellies that are poured over cream cheese, or for saving jellies that didn't set, because it's the only pectin you can add after you put the sugar in.
(Generally, the pectin has to dissolve and "bloom" in the juice at a boil for a minute or two before you add the sugar, and if it doesn't, you get syrup. So once you have a failed jelly that already has sugar in there, you can't try to re-cook it with regular pectin, but you can with liquid pectin.)
As to pectin contents of wild fruits, most are pretty variable. I've made no pectin chokecherry jelly from the fruits around here dependably for years, never had a failed set, even harvesting from bushes all over the state...but reading comments, it seems like they're not always high enough in pectin everywhere to get that same result.
My favorite wild fruit jam/jelly is with barberries. They're really amazing, at least from the bushes we have around here and the flavor is really complex and delicious. At this point, I've worked with most the wild fruits we have around here, so if there's one in particular you're trying to work on, let me know.
Hopefully this is in some way helpful to you. I really love your work Hank, and I'm sure you're going to come up with some killer jams =)
What a tremendously interesting/helpful post! The acid component I suspect is the culprit for non set. I'm working 60# of green gage plums today and I'm going to test for acid... so interesting! Thank You!
Wow! Such great detail, thank you so much! FWIW, I am using commercial pectin from apples, from Cuisine Tech. It's a powder, and is what my pastry chef friends use. Barberries? There are a lot of berries with that name. Do you know that Latin? Vaccinium, yes? Again, thanks so much for this.
Good on you Hank. Get yourself a copy of the Edmonds Sure to Rise cookbook from New Zealand. Jams (& to a lesser extent jellies) have been a rite of passage for housewives for decades here. Sadly that is no longer the case. I'm in about the same boat as you, although I've just had success with a barberry jelly: subtle and not over sweet, and my fingers are now healed! I've heard you can also do a basic pectin test, look it up, as wild fruits & berries will always differ from orchard grown. I used the temperature as setting guide for that jelly but I've also had that fail for jams. All the best.
Matthew from NZ
I've made hundreds, probably well over a thousand jars of jam and jelly over the past 15 years and was a master food preserver through the University of CA Cooperative Extension. That said, we make what we like, and we don't like the level of sugar in recipes that use normal commercial pectin or the old fashioned, no pectin added recipes. Too sweet and it diminishes the flavor of the fruit. My one exception is marmalade, and it's an art getting good at those. We use the Ball low or no sugar pectin and their recipes exclusively. And I use 50-75% more sugar than the max indicated in their recipes. It helps up keep the sweetness where we like it, and the pectin is flexible enough to handle it. No Splenda ever!
I’m on the same arc but have been lucky thus far. The books I’ve found are hard to love. They tend towards measurements given in volume only or in a mix between volume and weight and they often try too hard to be innovative. Basically cannot decide what they are.
The best one I’ve found so far is The Art Of Preserving by Emma McDonald (bought at least three others before that and passed on to the thrift store). It has some stuff in it not useful to me but also solid recipes and instructions.
Just made a version of her raspberry jam and it worked both flavor wise as well as set well. I like my jam on the harder set side of things and found hers perfect. Doing her citrus baseline recipe this week.
You just introduced me to a new way of making toast- by frying it! Genius.
It really is amazing!
Well just as I saw your reply I had "toasted" it with olive oil in a skillet- very good and hearty. Plus, who has a toaster when camping?!
Really good, and now having gone through all of that and having at least a few Jars of Jelly or Jam done right use some of these as a base for glazes for grilled doves or ducks and you'll be glad you did!