Jams 101:

Fruit jam, it is simple, easy, tasty and makes everyone happy. Making jams during the growing season is essential to a hobbit-core lifestyle. Simmering fruits with sugar until they are a delightful little spread is crucial to maintaining a whimsical attitude.

This recipe has a short ingredient list and a long guide through the steps because there is not much to it ingredient wise, it really comes down to doing it and learning if you are doing it right or not. Making jam is not a “pop them in the oven at 350 for 11 minutes and then they are done” kind of thing, the time it takes to complete a batch is dependent on a lot of factors so you just have to figure out when it looks right and is done. More on that to come.

My Wild Blackberry Jam recipe:

Ingredients- Blackberries, cane sugar, lemon juice. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. This recipe does not require pectin as the blackberries have a sufficient natural pectin content to get the jam to set nicely.

Equipment- Bowl, Scale, clean and sterile jars for your finished jam, a large pot or saucepan that evenly heats, your pot must heat evenly or else you will have hot spots that will scorch your jam. I use a large enameled cocotte/dutch oven and have had no issues with burning.

To do this properly you need to weigh your blackberries to get an accurate net weight, you add sugar in a percent by total weight ratio. In my experimenting I have found that a 1 to .75 ratio of Blackberries to sugar is my ideal range.

This produces a jam that sets nicely, has a spreadable texture that is not too thick nor is it too runny, while not being too sweet. The majority of recipes online recommend a 1 to 1 ratio of berries to sugar, that is way too sweet, the cane sugar flavor becomes dominant, and the actual berry flavor becomes secondary.

I experimented with a variety of ratios, 1:0.8, 1:0.75 and 1:0.7

At 1:0.8 I found the sugar taste too be far too dominant, at 1:0.7 the jam did not set as nicely and was too runny/not firm enough for what I think of as a “normal jam”, 1:0.75 is that nice goldilocks zone, great flavor, still fruit dominant and a good texture.

If you are thinking “well I don’t like sweet so I’ll just use way less sugar” this is a bad idea, the sugar is what preserves the jam, a high enough sugar content helps protects the fruit from harmful bacteria growth, too little sugar and your jam will be prone to spoiling rapidly, shortening the shelf life drastically.

By the way, if you don’t have a kitchen scale at this point you really need one, a lot of these recipes are going to require weighing.

So, back to the jam making process.

Weigh your berries(in grams, it makes it easier, don’t waste time), write down the weight so you don’t forget, then pour them into your pot. You will not be heating the pot at this point, the stove should be off.

Calculate your sugar addition using the formula X * .75, so if you have 1,500g of berries you multiply 1,500 * 0.75 = 1,125g sugar. Weigh out your sugar then pour it into your pot with your blackberries, working it in gently so that it is not just mounded up on top.

Now you add your lemon juice, using fresh lemons I add at the rate of the juice from 1 whole lemon per 1,000g of berries. This one is not super strict, just round out with it. If you have 1,700 to 2,200g of berries just use 2 lemons, it is not as big of a deal.

Add your lemon juice to your berries and sugar and cover your pot. Now at this point you have 2 options, 1- you can start to cook the fruit straight away, 2- you can allow the fruit to macerate for a few hours or overnight until the next day. In my experience the macerating does bring out some of the more faint fruit flavors and gets a deeper, more vibrant color, however it is not a dramatic difference so choose as you wish.

Now it is time to turn on the heat, place your pot on the stove and set the burner to medium heat. During this stage you really want to keep an eye on it, if heating too quickly things can burn, too slow and it is going to take forever, in this stage you are looking to get things in a more liquid state, the sugar and fruit is very thick and will be difficult to stir at all, you want to dissolve the sugar and start pulling juice out of the berries but you are not looking for a rolling boil. This step for me usually takes around 10 minutes to go from cold fruit to a light simmer and everything is liquid enough I can move it around.

From that point, periodically gently stir the jam to ensure the heat is even and there are no cold pockets within the fruit, continue with the periodic stirring and medium high heat until you reach a consistent simmer and soft bubbling. If the jams is bubbling in large bubbles that splatter out of the pot your temperature is too high and you need to turn it down. If it is hardly moving then your temperature is too low and you will need to increase your heat. This part is why it is hard to outline a definitive temperature setting and timing, every stove burner heats differently, what is a 4 on your stove may be the equivalent of a 7 on mine and vice versa, take your time, pay attention and learn your stove as you go along.

I leave it at this healthy simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring gently throughout most of that time, after that time I reduce the heat to a low simmer and allow the pot to settle down and return to periodic stirs. At this point you really want the sugar and fruit to get to a zone of simmering where there is a foam beginning to bubble up. The foam will start out kind thick like the head of a beer, then slowly it will turn to a shimmery, glassy, fruit colored bubble. Once you get that glassy bubbling/foam going you are in the right zone. give it about 15 minutes at this temperature where it is shimmering bubbles, then reduce the temp until you are at a low simmer.

At this point you are in the home stretch and are just simmering until it looks right. The “looking right” part comes down to 1- a spoon test, dip a cold spoon into the jam, pull it out but hold it over the pot, observe how the jam runs of the spoon, if it drips right off like juice you still have a ways to go, if it drips but is moving more slowly keep an eye on it. Your target is for the jam to slowly roll off the spoon like a warm syrup. Remember your jam is very hot at this stage so the viscosity it is now vs once it is room or fridge temp is very different. If you cook it until the point that it is jam thick while hot, well… you are going to end up with a paste.

The second part of “looking right” is 2- how much has the total volume of the jam reduced in the pot, in my experiments I have found a roughly 20-30% volume reduction seems to be about right. So if you have hardly reduced it at all, it is probably going to take quite a bit more time.

This total cooking process for a 3,000g batch usually takes me about 2 hours, with the last hour being a rather non attentive low simmer.

Once your jam looks right, remove your pot from the heat and allow it to cool a bit to a temperature that you can work with it, without getting burned. Pouring it into the jars always ends up with some amount of splatter and you don’t want splatter that burns you, then you end up dropping something and everything gets worse.

Once the jam is cool enough to work with you can: 1- ladle it into the jars of your choosing and allow them to cool uncovered until they are room temp, seal them up and move them to the fridge, or you can ladle them into canning jars and can them straight away so that they are fully preserved for very long-term storage. In the fridge the jam will last several months, canned they will last years really.

A big note to add, I did not describe crushing or smashing the berries at any point in this recipe, throughout the cooking the berries breakdown quite bit on their own but some nearly whole berries are left, which maybe technically makes this a preserve but whatever, semantics. If you would like to have less large berry pieces you can simply crush the fruit during the initial maceration, or during the cooking process. Make several batches and figure out what you prefer, everyone has a different preference! If there is anything you gleaned from this recipe I hope it is that making jams is easy once you learn what to look for and what to expect, with all of my recipes I encourage you make it multiple times until you have the feel for it, then it is just as easy as ever.

Enjoy,

Mr. Grey Pill