Why jam won't gel
Homemade
apple pectin
works! Which isn't to say that my jam-making experiments
haven't included some growing pains over the last week. For
example, my first try (shown above) didn't gel...so I renamed it
"Peach Syrup" and pronounced it a success anyway.
Why didn't Jam 1.0
solidify? Reading up on the topic suggested three potential
problems:
- Too large of a recipe.
Joy
of Cooking recommends starting with no more than 4 cups of
fruit, and I used 4 cups of peach puree plus 4 cups of
apple-pectin juice for Jam 1.0. The trouble with big
batches of jam is that jamming is very temperature-dependent,
and the average home kitchen won't keep the contents of a large
pot as evenly heated as the contents of a small pot. For
Jam 2.0, I split my recipe into two pots, each of which held
only four cups of liquid.
Not enough sugar.
The recipe I was following called for 7 cups of sugar, but that
just seemed extraordinarily high, so I cut it to 4 to match the
amount of peach puree. Joy of Cooking again came to the rescue,
telling me that I need 0.75 to 1 cup of sugar per cup of fruit
(and the apple juice is fruit, remember) if I don't use
low-sugar pectin. (I do want to try our readers'
suggestion of Pomona's
Pectin, but our little grocery store doesn't carry it, I
forgot to look for the item when I was in the big city over the
weekend, and there's not enough time to order it online before
the peaches finish ripening.)- Not enough cooking time.
Joy of Cooking
once again provided facts, telling me that it's necessary to
cook your jam until it reaches 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than
the temperature
at which water boils at your altitude. (So, I'm
looking for a jam temperature of 217.7 here.) If your
mother-in-law didn't give you a jelly thermometer like mine did
(thanks, Rose Nell!), you can also estimate this temperature by
letting the jam run off the side of your spoon --- when the
drops merge together into a sheet, the jam is ready.
Jam 2.0 went much
better. I brought 2 cups of my apple-pectin juice to a boil,
simmered for 5 minutes, then added 2 cups of pureed peach, 3 cups
of sugar, and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Then I brought
the mixture back to a boil and simmered for about fifteen minutes
until the temperature seemed right. After 10 minutes in the
hot-water-bath canner, the jars were full of jam that stayed put
even when I turned the jars sideways!
I'm not 100% happy
with the results, but Jam 2.0 is definitely an improvement.
I now see what various commenters meant when you said that this
kind of jam has a "cooked taste." Sure enough, the bit of
jam that didn't fit in the jars and that Mark and I tasted with
dinner was more like candy than fruit (no wonder, since the
cooked-down jam included half a cup of sugar per cup of finished
jam!). And Jam 2.0 is more solid than I really needed,
probably because I hadn't done the altitude calculations before
writing this post and cooked my jam to 220 degrees instead of
218. But perhaps that's a sign I could cut back the sugar a
bit more since this recipe gelled so well?
Since it's so hard to
tell when a white peach is perfectly ripe, I've been harvesting
the drops each morning, which have been amounting to about a third
of a bushel of peaches per day. I figure this amount will
hold out until the end of the week, so I'll probably make at least
one more try at jamming. But first, we'll eat up these
shiitakes that popped up in one of the logs I had resting in the
peach tree's shade.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
- Remove comment