In need of reader help if anyone is out there…
(The question is at the end)
I am determined to make at least some jam from everything in the orchard this year, even if only a small amount. I am inspired by Walter’s cousin Mathias who started making small jars of jam with Natacha almost as soon as they moved into their house just outside Paris. And great combinations, too, which he generously gifted us. I’m also inspired by the neighbors and friends who show up with a basket to pick our excess figs and plums and deliver jam a few days later. Making jam is a way to extend the pleasure of the orchard and bring some sunshine into the dark winter months (well, weeks anyway). And I am trying not to waste the amazing riches of this place. So, jam it is!
Like my neighbors, I want my jam to be less sweet. But I want it thick enough to stay on the bread (or balance on top of some clotted cream should I find any). The balance between sweetness and thickness is at the heart of jam making for me. And in the US I found the answer: low sugar pectin, which allows jam to set without much (or any) sugar or boiling it to death. Seriously a game changer. It allows you to make jam that sets firmly but retains the tartness of the fruit!
A Pectin primer
Pectin is what makes low acid fruit set into jam. It can come from the fruit itself, the peel and the pits (like the wild black cherry jam I made last week) or added apple, or commercial or homemade pectin can be added to the sugar and boiled with the fruit and lemon juice to make it set. Non-jam-makers should know that the traditional way to make jam is a 1 : 1 ratio of fruit to sugar with varying amounts of lemon juice and commercial pectin depending on the amount of pectin naturally occurring in the fruit. For low pectin fruit like strawberries, rhubarb, and cherries, even more sugar (1 : 1.1) is called for along with 2 tbs lemon juice per pound of fruit *and* added pectin. Here’s a handy calculator for the curious. That’s a lot of sugar. If you don’t use pectin, you can boil the fruit, sugar, and lemon juice for longer than the 2-3 minutes it normally takes (often quite a bit longer), which does the trick although cooks off a lot of the vitamins in the process and you still need 1 : 1 sugar if you want it to set to jam not sauce
That’s how we made it when I was young. I used to make strawberry jam almost every night for the month or so we went strawberry picking in the June. A van would pick up willing workers across from our housing estate and along the way to Fernhurst, and we would join migrant workers and other mothers and children to pick early berries (including those sold at Wimbledon) from inside huge plastic covered tunnels and then naturally ripened fruit from fields with rows that seemed to go on forever. As we delivered our trays full of punnets of fruit they would be sorted and before they were weighed any imperfect berries would be put into a big box from which we were invited to help ourselves at the end of the day. It was a very wise strategy.
The first day we kids ate one strawberry for every one we delivered for payment. By day three both our digestive systems and our tongues had had enough, and everything we picked went into a punnet and up to the table to be weighed and recorded. Giving us fruit to take home further decreased the likelihood of snacking (or taking) fruit as we worked, and compensated somewhat for the damaged fruit that we were not paid for picking. Naturally we took our share, and every evening I was on jam duty while my mother put my brother to bed. This may have only been one or two summers, I don’t remember, but the making of the jam is a strong and fond memory of summer nonetheless. Moreso because I adore strawberries and strawberry jam. But my jam was 1:1 sweet and boiled until it passed the cold saucer test, which seems in my memory as if it was a long time.
Jam on top or jam on the bottom? [yes, it can create heated debate—here’s what “Serious Eats” has to say about it]. I love both, but if the scone is warm the jam has to go on the bottom to stop the cream melting. End of discussion.
But the sugar
Now I’m in France and the orchard is dropping cherries. So, began the quest to find low sugar pectin in the grocery stores here in France, which expanded to an effort to find any pectin here. When I was growing up you could get it in grocery stores in England and you still can in the US. But not here my little part of SW France! Why? Do folks just use lemon juice? I wondered. Do they rely on a long boil? Apple peel? I was all set to ask someone when I found the answer. Meanwhile, I had given up on finding low-sugar pectin here and bought some back with me from the US when I went back for graduation. I made the wild black cherry jam without pectin, but when I settled down to make the next batch from the Rainer cherries I realized in addition to using pectin from my stash I needed to buy more sugar.
I headed to the supermarket. And there, on the shelf with all the other sugars that I had formerly ignored, I spied the answer: “Sucre Confiture” (“Sucre blanc poudre gélifiant”), 98.6% sugar, 1.4% pectin and citric acid. (A moment for me to recover from my mind being blown please!). I don’t believe such a thing exits in the US, but maybe it does and like here I just never noticed. The trouble with this French all-included sugar is that the pectin is not the low sugar kind. Which matters if you don’t want sweet jam. The “recipe” on the bag is the traditional 1 : 1 fruit to sugar. Use less sugar and you get less pectin, but more important, without that golden ratio the pectin won’t work. The jam will be the right amount of tart, but the wrong amount of runny. Great to pour on ice cream; less great on bread or scones.
Before I realized that limitation I had bought three bags of the stuff, the store (a half hour’s drive away) was already closed, and I already pitted the cherries for the jam.
So here is my question for any real jam-makers out there:
If I use a 3 : 1 fruit to sugar ratio as this lovely recipe from Ashley Adamant for Rainer cherry jam does, and if that sugar is the pectin-enhanced kind, how much additional pectin do I need to add? And if it is low sugar pectin, does that actually matter?
I tried the Rainer Cherry recipe, adding 2/3 of a teaspoon of pectin to compensate for the 2/3 I was missing by only using 1/3 the amount of sugar the package called for. I over-boiled it a bit so it was a touch gelatinous, but the taste was fabulous and it was just as tart as we both like and not too thick. I added a little vanilla to one of the jars and think I might do that again. Maybe violet in honor of Toulouse. But that’s it for the cherries this year.
On to plums (Mirabelles first) in a few weeks, but advice about pectin very much appreciated before I start.
