Jam: An Update

[highlyeccentric]

Today I am making moar jam. But first let me describe Jam(1): spiced plum jam in the slow cooker.


Dietary: contains apples, which you might not normally expect for plum jam.
Access: Works in the slow cooker, which eliminates the "sweating over the stove" part of the Meg March Jam Fiasco. Should theoretically work without a blender: the ancestor recipe recommended grating the apple, in that case.


2 Apples, preferably green
Around 500 grams of plums (which is roughly what I had after removing the cores from a large punnet)
Cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves, black pepper
A couple of tablespoons of lemon juice
Sugar: preferably "jam sugar", but the ancestor recipe I used was a no peel no pectin recipe.
Jars: I needed 6 small sterilised jars and one ad-hoc container for overflow.
2 saucuers, chilled in the freezer

1. Dice your apples into small cubes, preferably into a bowl that's on scales. Dice the plums in as well, stopping when it reaches a round 50 gram point between 600 and 750 grams.
2. Blitz all the fruit in a blender. Return to bowl: add sugar equal in weight to the fruit. (I used 500g of jam sugar + about 200g of regular white sugar). Add spices - go heavy on the pepper, it really does work I promise.
3. Refridgerate for several hours or overnight.
4. Pop the mix into a slow cooker, and cook, covered, on high for about 4 hours, opening it up and stirring every half hour or so. If you have a "reduce" setting on your slow cooker, probably switch to follow the Women's Weekly slow cooker jam instructions at this point. For myself, I wedged the lid slightly open and kept an eye on it over the next hour or so.
5. At what seems an auspicious time (bear in mind, I had never made jam before, I was just ... vibing), remove a saucer from the frezer and spoon some jam onto it. If you can draw your clean finger through the jam and you get a parting of the jam seas, instead of a ripple: voila! You have jam. If not, keep going, enjoy your Meg March Jam Fiasco.
6. Also at an auspicious time, sterilise jars. I did a quick oven sterilising, and, for such a small batch, did not bother water-processing them after filling.
7. Fill jars with jam. K and I managed this with a ladle, no jam funnel required. Seal. Leave to stand.

If the pop tops on the jars have gone down: hooray, you have reasonably well sterilised jars. If they have not, you can theoretically warm up the jam and re-sterilise and try again. If some have sealed and some have not, eat the un-sealed ones within four weeks, or freeze them. The most common way that jam spoils is mould. Don't eat jam with visible mould on it, commercial or home-made. If your jam changes taste noticably, probably stop eating it. This has been food safety for home cookery with Az.

Comments

[chez_jae]

Sounds yummy!

[mific]

I'm gonna make this!

[chochiyo_sama]

When I was a child, my mother made jam, poured it in glass jars, and sealed it with a layer of paraffin about half an inch thick. The jam frequently got moldy--my mother just scooped the mold off with a spoon and we ate it anyway.

I am perpetually amazed that we survived our childhoods and did not sustain any permanent damage due to all the crazy parenting failures my parents gleefully subjected us to.