I agree with experimentation. Jam needs to get to at least 217F in order to resemble jam. This can take a frustratingly long time without pectin to help gel the product, as most of the water needs to boil off. For those who don’t know, pectin is a natural product made from apple or citrus peels, not a chemical. It requires heat and sugar to set. My wife resisted using it until I showed her the literature.
Handy video of how to perform the test - see from ~7 minutes onwards. I put the saucers on the fridge rather than the freezer.
j
I heated it to 219F, and i live at sea level.
Maybe i didn’t add enough sugar?
Did i somehow damage the pectin? I’ve done this at least a dozen times, with berries from these bushes and following the same recipe.
Something happened. If all things were equal in your kitchen world it should’ve jammed.
These things happen. You’ll probably never know why.
I got up this morning, we were faced with ripe tomatoes coming out our ears. I was hoping we were done. But a recent rain and loads of heat and the tomato plants decided we needed more, more, more.
My mid-dau wanted to do Tomato jam. It takes a bunch of tomatoes and they don’t need to be perfect. You know the odd balls, the too small for slicing. A bit over ripe. Tomato jam can handle it. After peeling (PITA) it’s easy.
These are Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, high sugar content. Just a small amount of brown sugar or molasses for the flavor. Spices, onion, garlic, pepper(heat level, your choice) and lots of time.
It will be thick, dark, a bit lumpy (but not actual pieces of tomato) and tasty on a biscuit.
Some use it as a marinade or a condiment on veggies. I happen to like it on purple hull peas.
We got 8 pints canned.
Yes, something happened. One thing that happened is that instead of boiling the juice for a bit and skimming it, and then gently pouring in sugar while I stirred, I dumped the sugar into the pot of cold juice and then tried to stir it up. It was too much sugar for the cold juice to hold, and I had a slurry of sugar for a while. And I got some clumps of pectin coming out of solution. They dissolved when I heated it enough.
That why I am asking if it’s possible to damage the pectin. Because if I damaged it, maybe the right thing to do is to add more. But if that’s not a thing that happens, the solution is something else. I don’t want to make a weird pectinous product. Like, maybe I didn’t add enough sugar. Or maybe just cooking it down more will do the trick, or…
I am still looking for solutions. I’m loath to give up, and I can’t imagine using up this much currant sauce as a thin sauce.
I just googled,
Overripe fruit doesn’t have enough pectin to gel.
Overcooking destroys pectin.
Undercooking doesn’t bring enough pectin out.
Here’s what I’d do: purchase some Certo pectin. (Sure-gel)
Heat it back up to boiling. Add the pouch of the powder.
And time it. The PKG tells you how long.
ETA, Ball as in ball jars has their own brand of pectin, as well.
The stuff is not a thin liquid, it’s slushy. I’m afraid if i just add pectin, I’ll get goo. I really need to understand it better to fix it, i think.
(Fruit not over ripe. I doubt it’s over cooked. I’m sure i extracted a lot of pectin from the fruit. I still wonder if i somehow broke some of the pectin when i dumped the sugar in.)
There must be some way to test it.
Couple choices. Toss it or re-cook it.
Worth a try to re-cook. If you get goo, which is kinda what jam is, IMO, and it’s awful, then toss it.
My granny made jam, she would cook the fruit with sugar and lemon peel. It would be a syrup. Jarred it up.
She then water bath canned it. Magically, it was jam when it came out.
I know now what happened, as a kid I was fascinated by the canning process.
My jam/jelly success took a significant upward turn when I started using a digital thermometer to determine the set point - the recipe is still important and there needs to be enough pectin and whatnot, but the batch of jam I made last year was a good example of how the thermometer is useful - I wanted a really delicate set so I stopped it the moment it reached 105 Celsius. The morning after bottling, it still seemed like it might just be a thick syrup in the jars but we went away for a week and when we came back, the jam had set just to that incredibly wobbly, melts-on-warm-toast texture that wins prizes at county shows.
If you don’t have a digital thermometer, it’s worth getting one instead of messing around with chilled plates or glass thermometers that are hard to read precisely. I work in Celsius but most of them are switchable to Fahrenheit for those who prefer it.
I have a digital thermometer, and I’m still learning how to use it. And, hmm, (translating to Celsius) i took it off the heat just below 104. My notes said this temperature worked last time, but maybe i made a mistake. And while i thought i just had liquid, after setting for two days i had a slurry. Maybe i should just reheat and bring it up a little hotter.
Thanks.
Yeah, one or two degrees can be the difference (most of what you’re really doing when you boil up to a specific temperature is reducing the jam so that it is more concentrated)
(I’m bilingual in Fahrenheit & Celsius for outdoor temperatures, between freezing and body temperature. But all my recipes are in Fahrenheit, and it’s just a number, so i generally see no reason to translate them. I cooked the jelly to 219F.)
Inspired by this, I’m going to try making peach and habanero jam this morning. I have a pound and a half of orchard peaches and some habaneros. Recipes online are all over the place as to the proportion of habaneros to add, so I’m going to start out cautiously and add the minimum amount. Those suckers are hot! And I’ll add a teaspoon less of pectin to see if I get a slightly softer jam.
And it’s in the jars. I’ll have some on toast this morning with breakfast.
Mmmm. Not sure how deep your habanero interest goes, but apparently Belize habaneros are the best. There was all sorts of controversy when Marie Sharp (a Belize habanero farmer) introduced a line of hot sauces called Melinda’s. She wanted to market her sauces in the US, and then whoever she was working with stole the name. She then released a line of sauces under the Marie Sharp’s name. Hot sauce aficionados have stopped buying Melinda’s and gone over to Marie Sharp’s, although it is more difficult to find.
Any pepper use has to be for your taste or the people you offer it to.
We go light on pepper in any thing because of the children.
I’ve made pure pepper jelly. It is so hard to control the heat. You must know your pepper or risk big surprises.
I made some once, I swear could’ve been used medically for capsaicin treatments.
I kept it awhile thinking it would mellow with age. Nope got hotter. Eventually had to throw it out.
You should check anyway, it’s usually tucked in out of the way next to the gelatine and citric acid.
But if the store truly doesn’t have it, you can always do it the old fashioned way by simmering some peels and cores of apples for ~2 hours to extract the pectin. Next time you eat apples, you can save the peels and cores in a freezer bag until you accumulate enough and boil when you have enough for a recurring source of pectin.
I don’t think they carry citric acid, either. They do carry plain gelatin. But I’m sure Amazon carries pectin.
That being said, I’m dubious that apples have more pectin than red currants.
Yup, above the average for “cooking apples”. I think i either didn’t add enough sugar or didn’t cook it to a high enough temperature. I’m cooking to cook it up another degree or two when i return from this trip, and i expect it will be fine.
This recipe says 221, which agrees with mangetout. I’m not sure why i wrote down 219 last time, but my notes aren’t always reliable, especially the first time i write them.
It’s not that apples have more, it’s that they’re a mild flavored, neutral source so you can use it to doctor up any existing jams that have texture problems without noticeably affecting flavor. It’s a quick fix if you’re not willing to wait the days to mail order pectin as any store will carry apples.
Remove the seeds, or at least most of them; a concentration of the seeds can give you cyanide poisoning. It does take a lot of them; swallowing an occasional seed is harmless.
If you don’t use too much of it. Somebody gave me a batch of no-sugar-added jams. They claim to be various flavors, but they all taste like weak apple juice.