Makin' some jam.

Biita wrote:

I also make alot of jams with the berries I pick during summer, but one thing i have found out that works great is to freeze your berries of all kinds first. don't wash them, just put right in the freezer. The freezing condenses the juices and when you take them out and put right in the pots to cook its like using concentrated juice instead of water. Stronger tasting jams and sweeter too!

Also if the recipe calls for 2 litres of berries, after they are picked i measure out 2 litres or more and put right into one bag. That way when i am ready to cook i just open a bag and start, no measuring needed for that. If i need 4, then 2 bags come out and so on.

Good luck and have lots of fun, its well worth all the effort, when you eat your first slice of bread with your own homemade jam!!!

Absolutely. It just doesn't make sense to me to cook hot jam on a hot summer day, so I freeze all my jam fruit and cook it up around Christmas time. It's just a treat to pull out summer fruit in the winter, and of course the cooking smells are awesome. It heats my home to be doing long, slow cooking processes which saves on energy. The cooling period is much shorter so if some of your jars need to be redone, you don't have to wait forever to figure out which ones! And, finally if you have all your fruit in one place you aren't limited to one flavor, you can come up with some yummy combinations!

petunia wrote:

.......I been reading back thru these post. To see if anyone done rhubarb jam or jelly. I think I would like to try Rhubarb, it seems it would be really sweet. If anyone has any easy good recipes please let me know, as I have never jammed before.

hi petunia! i'm new here today and i just read through all the posts here. so glad you mentioned rhubarb! i made a big batch (for the first time) of Rhubarb-Strawberry Jam when our strawberries were coming on, and it turned out YUMO! Mr. Green

here's the recipe...

Quote:

Rhubarb-Strawberry Jam

Ingredients:

2 pounds strawberries (4 cups, mashed)
2 pounds rhubarb (8 cups, 1/2 inch pieces)
6 cups sugar

Procedure:

Wash fruit. Cut rhubarb into 1/2 inch pieces. Cover rhubarb with half of the sugar and let stand 1 to 2 hours. Crush berries and mix with remaining sugar and combine with rhubarb. Place mixture over low heat until sugar is dissolved, then boil rapidly, stirring frequently to prevent burning. Cook until thick. Pour into sterilized Kerr jars to within 1/4 inch of top. Put on cap, screw band firmly tight. Process in boiling water bath 10 minutes. Yield: 10 eight oz. jars.

i also agree with you all on the 'chunkie' fruit jams, and on the gift ideas! i gave away plum jam last year and it was a big hit! i'm going to try blackberry jam too this year. they're almost ready for picking...and our three year old peach tree finally produced this year and are almost ripe...and thanks for the freezing-the-fruit first idea!

one other thing, we just found a solar oven on sale, and i'm reading some interesting stuff about canning fruit, jams, anything with fruit in it! i baked bread in it the other day and it was soooo good. the crust was a bit tough, but a couple spoonfuls of our rhubarb-strawberry jam and it was good to go!