Adventures in Jam
Jan. 13th, 2019 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrasteToday, I made plum jam:
This is super exciting because it is the second time I have made jam in my entire life and I still did not set anything on fire! Eventually I may become blasé about this and stop spamming people I know with pictures of my creations that just say JAM but I think it may take a while.
I only started on this culinary project because last month my parents arrived at my house with a kilo of strawberries. Which would have been fine, but they also brought a bag of cherries and a whole box of apricots and some oranges. (I think Dad worries I am going to get scurvy, for some reason.) Since I am only one person and have only one stomach, obviously the only solution was to make JAM.
My mother has always done this a lot, but I never have because it seemed complicated and I am not always trustworthy and competent around boiling liquid. I was even more worried when the only suitable jars I could find at the local shopping centre a week before Christmas were preserving jars that needed to be boiled. But! It turns out that making jam and then canning it is actually ludicrously easy! As long as you have all the necessary equipment, you just put three things in a saucepan in the right proportions and wait for the result it to reach 105°C. Then you tip it into jars and boil the jars for ten minutes and, voilà, there is have JAM. You don't even have to worry about botulism! (Before I did the research, I was very worried. But it turns out that Thunder Bay lied to me all those years ago and you cannot get botulism from peaches. Or any other stone fruit, or apples, or pears, or berries, or jam, or chutney, or basically anything else most people might want to put in a preserving jar that isn't a tomato and even then you just have to add some vinegar. Just don't try canning your own mangos without an actual pressure canner.)
Today's batch was a lot less nerve-wracking than the first one because now I have proper jar tongs. I didn't realise until I had started the process that you can't leave the jars in the water after you've boiled them, so removing them involved a pair of ordinary metal tongs and an oven glove and really I am surprised I did not burn myself. With jar tongs and a culinary thermometer, though, it's far more straightforward. (We are just going to gloss over the part where I dropped the thermometer in the jam. Which the instructions specifically tell you not to do. But both the jam and the thermometer seem to have survived unscathed, so hooray?) And next time I use this particular fruit I'll know that it takes forever to get the pits out of the plums and plan my afternoon accordingly. At least I got through a couple of hours of podcasts while I was making a complete mess of the kitchen.
This is super exciting because it is the second time I have made jam in my entire life and I still did not set anything on fire! Eventually I may become blasé about this and stop spamming people I know with pictures of my creations that just say JAM but I think it may take a while.
I only started on this culinary project because last month my parents arrived at my house with a kilo of strawberries. Which would have been fine, but they also brought a bag of cherries and a whole box of apricots and some oranges. (I think Dad worries I am going to get scurvy, for some reason.) Since I am only one person and have only one stomach, obviously the only solution was to make JAM.
My mother has always done this a lot, but I never have because it seemed complicated and I am not always trustworthy and competent around boiling liquid. I was even more worried when the only suitable jars I could find at the local shopping centre a week before Christmas were preserving jars that needed to be boiled. But! It turns out that making jam and then canning it is actually ludicrously easy! As long as you have all the necessary equipment, you just put three things in a saucepan in the right proportions and wait for the result it to reach 105°C. Then you tip it into jars and boil the jars for ten minutes and, voilà, there is have JAM. You don't even have to worry about botulism! (Before I did the research, I was very worried. But it turns out that Thunder Bay lied to me all those years ago and you cannot get botulism from peaches. Or any other stone fruit, or apples, or pears, or berries, or jam, or chutney, or basically anything else most people might want to put in a preserving jar that isn't a tomato and even then you just have to add some vinegar. Just don't try canning your own mangos without an actual pressure canner.)
Today's batch was a lot less nerve-wracking than the first one because now I have proper jar tongs. I didn't realise until I had started the process that you can't leave the jars in the water after you've boiled them, so removing them involved a pair of ordinary metal tongs and an oven glove and really I am surprised I did not burn myself. With jar tongs and a culinary thermometer, though, it's far more straightforward. (We are just going to gloss over the part where I dropped the thermometer in the jam. Which the instructions specifically tell you not to do. But both the jam and the thermometer seem to have survived unscathed, so hooray?) And next time I use this particular fruit I'll know that it takes forever to get the pits out of the plums and plan my afternoon accordingly. At least I got through a couple of hours of podcasts while I was making a complete mess of the kitchen.