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Jamming on jam
Aug. 23rd, 2005 02:38 pmAfter a long but amusing day at the Dutchess County Fair with Rhys, I've done a bit more jam making, with the cores of the apples from our tree, left over after starting the apple butter that's half-done in the crockpot, and with some not-quite-overripe giant peaches from our weekly farmshare.
Cooking with pectin from apples instead of commercial pectin is a really different process. For one thing, the gel is really different than with citrus pectin (which is what Sure-Jell and the like are), even when it's perfect. It's softer, more like agar than like jello, yet also a bit more cohesive. Second, you never know how much pectin is in there, so you can't be sure whether adding a bit mre sugar will get a recalcitrant batch to gell, or if it's just going to sort of sneak over to the soft ball candy stage, and suddenly you're either making taffy (if you catch it), or just having glass jars full of a gloopy irredeemable mess. Sometimes, the extra sugar will help, but your jam gets carmelized while you're working on it, and you lose the fresh fruit taste all together.
Third, even in the best case, jelling pectin from apples takes a lot of sugar. This always seems even more extreme to me since I started doing my off-year jellies with low-methoxyl pectin, which uses calcium instead of sugar to cause the jelling, and so those batches have handly any added sugar at all.
This batch is a little overcooked, I think. The brown sugar caramel taste is going to overwhelm the subtle cardamom I added in there on a whim, even once it cools. But it should be edible, and it's mine.
Cooking with pectin from apples instead of commercial pectin is a really different process. For one thing, the gel is really different than with citrus pectin (which is what Sure-Jell and the like are), even when it's perfect. It's softer, more like agar than like jello, yet also a bit more cohesive. Second, you never know how much pectin is in there, so you can't be sure whether adding a bit mre sugar will get a recalcitrant batch to gell, or if it's just going to sort of sneak over to the soft ball candy stage, and suddenly you're either making taffy (if you catch it), or just having glass jars full of a gloopy irredeemable mess. Sometimes, the extra sugar will help, but your jam gets carmelized while you're working on it, and you lose the fresh fruit taste all together.
Third, even in the best case, jelling pectin from apples takes a lot of sugar. This always seems even more extreme to me since I started doing my off-year jellies with low-methoxyl pectin, which uses calcium instead of sugar to cause the jelling, and so those batches have handly any added sugar at all.
This batch is a little overcooked, I think. The brown sugar caramel taste is going to overwhelm the subtle cardamom I added in there on a whim, even once it cools. But it should be edible, and it's mine.
