pectin – Ali Does It Herself

Jam Session: Saskatoon Berries

You may remember that last year I surreptitiously liberated several service or Saskatoon berries from city property. This year it rained on Canada Day, our national holiday, and between thunderstorms I went out and hauled in about 4 litres of them. Everyone who passed through the kitchen during our Canada Day get-together asked where I’d gotten so many cranberries. I got a little testy explaining that they were service berries each time. I guess they DO kind of look like cranberries, but whatever.

I decided to make jam out of all my berries (and I actually ended up with so many berries that I had some leftover even after two batches of jam). I bought two dozen of the wee 175mL Bernardin canning jars and popped them into my canner to sterilize. I turned on the stove and brought those to a low boil.

I put the rings aside and put the discs in a heatproof bowl.

I heated a kettle and poured almost boiling water over the discs to let the rubber soften.

I gathered my other canning tools and had them handy. Always use non-metallic implements when making jam.

I get very irritated when I make jam because I always end up either burning myself on boiling sugar or burning myself with steam or hot water and everything ends up sticky and it’s already hot making jam in the summer so I decided to double my batch so I wouldn’t have to repeat the process in the same day. When you do this you have to make sure that your proportions are exact so you don’t mess up your ratios of acid to sugar to pectin.

The recipe I used is from the Bernardin website and advocates the use of the crystallized pectin, but the liquid stuff had been on sale so I used that instead. The process is a little different using liquid pectin in terms of when you add the sugar and stuff so the process below reflects that.

It’s a good idea to pre-cut the packages and sit them upright in a cup so they’re handy when you need them.

Now that all your canning stuff is ready to go, you can get onto the actual jam component. Grab your berries, about 9 cups service berries (for a single batch, though in these photos that’s doubled), and plop them in a pan. I like to use my Lee Valley maslin pan because it’s kind of designed for jam and candy making and I love it. Plus it has a great handle that is very useful. Mush up your berries with a potato masher so they don’t explode on you later and so all the berry goodness gets out there early on.

Tip in as well 4 tablespoons lemon juice and 1/2 teaspoon butter or margarine (apparently this helps prevent it from foaming too much but I don’t think it helped in my case).

Start heating the berries on medium-high and give them a good stirring. Measure out 6 cups granulated sugar and add that in as well.

You’ll find the berries very quickly become way more liquidy.

You want the berries to be at a decent boil that doesn’t go away when you stir (watch out for flying berry juice that can burn you).

When you get to that state, grab your pectin and quickly add it to the jam and give it a quick but thorough stirring.

Let it come back to a rolling boil again and leave that for 1 minute before removing the jam from the heat. Don’t burn yourself!

Skim off any foam with a non-metallic utensil. The jam foam was always a huge treat for us as kids to eat with a spoon. I offered it to the Pie and he refused it. I was miffed about that.

Grab your jars from the canner and drain them.

Fill them with your jam, leaving about 1/4″ of headspace between the jam and where the lid will go. Use a wet towel to wipe off any jam on the edge of the jar where the disc will need to be tightly sealed.

Plop the disks onto the jam jars and add the rings and tighten to fingertip tightness. Return the sealed jars to your canner and bring the water back to a boil and leave it for the time required by your canner and the number of jars you have in there.

I set my jars on a cookie rack to cool completely. These are the first batch of my DIY holiday gifts this year.

And I bought some overflow jars for myself, knowing I didn’t have enough jars for the jam I made. And I quickly filled the overflow jars, and then a bunch of plastic containers I had lying around. SO MUCH JAM.

Kumquat Marmalade

This recipe was so STUPID. SO STUPID, in fact, that it took me two tries to get it right, and I only got it right after ignoring all the previous instructions. So in fact I will not even link you to this stupid recipe that I used for fear of it tainting me with its idiocy. I take full credit for this, seeing as I had to fix it. MANY TIMES. What I present below is the CORRECT way to do it, and should produce about 4 pints of marmalade.

If you’ve never had a kumquat, you should try one. Sweet and bitter at the same time, it’s definitely an experience. I like to think of them as tasty breath-fresheners. Your first bite will be sweet, then as you crunch through the skin, the citrus oils will clear out your palette. Quite refreshing, actually.Make sure you pick kumquats that are firm and don’t have any squishy spots. Use them soon after you buy them because they go quickly.

Wash and remove the stems from 24 fresh kumquats.

Slice them thinly across the middle, and remove the seeds.

Make sure you keep the seeds.

This is where all the pectin-y goodness is.

There’s pectin in the pith as well, but not as much.

Slice 2 oranges across the middle as well.

I used Navel oranges. This seedless fruit is neat because it reproduces by growing a new orange in its belly button (or navel), which is that thing you see at the opposite end to the stem.

This orange reproduced another whole orange inside. How cool. I bet it would have been confusing to eat had I peeled it normally.

I found it was easier to can the marmalade if you make cuts in the orange peel so it breaks apart and is therefore smaller.

Toss the orange slices and the kumquat slices together in a measuring cup and see how much you have.

Chuck them in a large bowl and add 3 cups of water for every cup of fruit you measured. I had 5 cups of fruit so I added 15 cups of water. Leave that to sit overnight.

The next day, pour your fruit and water into a large saucepan (this is why I love our maslin pan so much). You may find some jelly-like stuff at the bottom of the bowl. I’m not sure what it is but I think it’s important, so scrape that stuff off and put it in the pan as well.

Bring the stuff in the pan to a boil and then lower the heat and simmer it until the rinds are very tender and you can squish them with your spoon.

Juice 2 lemons.

Pour that lemon juice, together with 9 cups granulated sugar, into the maslin pan.

Tie up your seeds in a bit of cheesecloth and add that to the pot as well.

Bring the mixture to a boil again, then simmer on low for a couple of hours.

The mixture will cook down, reducing in size, getting thicker and darker. Keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn, and keep stirring it. When it starts to foam, you are nearing your gel point.

You can tell if your mixture is ready to gel by putting a plate in the freezer for a few minutes. Remove the plate and drip some of the liquid across the plate. Once it has cooled, give it a push with your finger. If it wrinkles up, your marmalade is ready to go into the jar.

When you have reached the stage where your foamy marmalade goo is wrinkling on your cold plate, you can can it according to your canner’s instructions. Check out our tips here.

Vanilla and Nectarine Preserves

I told you I was going to attempt Vicious Sweet Tooth’s Vanilla and Nectarine preserves, and so here we go.

She has some good tips on canning, and of course my mother and I recently made some grape jam with a canner, so just follow those instructions and you should be fine.

Pit and chop up about 4 1/2 lbs nectarines. Leave the skins on, because that’s where you get the pectin from. We used about 4L nectarines, so it probably is slightly more than we needed but what the hey.

Plop them in a pot with 2 cups granulated sugar, 1/3 cup lemon juice, and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract. We chucked in one of our old vanilla beans (you can re-use vanilla beans, did you know?) for good measure.

Bring the fruit mixture to a boil. The pectin in the skins will help your preserves to gel.

The mixture should thicken and darken a bit.

To see if it’s ready to can, put a plate (or in our case, a ramekin, which can handle the temperature change without cracking) in the freezer for a little while, then remove it and drop some of your hot jam mixture onto the plate. Put it back in the freezer to cool for a few minutes. If you give the drop a push and it wrinkles up, it’s ready for canning and will gel nicely in the jar.