Jam

Jam is by far the easiest form of preserving fruit. After washing the fruit is peeled and pitted, if needed, crushed, boiled with sugar until it is a thick, soft mass. Light colored fruit should be acidulated, dropping it into water that has had lemon juice added, before beginning the cooking process.

 Pectin level is irrelevant, as the fruit pulp is suspended in the thick liquid. Fruit for jam making needs to be ripe but still firm. If it is too soft, the fruit will disintegrate. As with marmalade, spices, brandies, or liqueurs may be added to enhance the flavor of the fruit.

Hot-pack the jam into pint jars. Process the jars using a water bath for fifteen minutes.

The lengthy cooking time required for reducing fruit to jam can cause the fruit to lose the intensity of its color and texture. This can be avoided by starting with sugar syrup to cook the fruit in until it becomes tender, but this makes the resulting mixture a preserve rather than a true jam.

One method of avoiding the loss of color and texture is to cook down the juice in stages without the fruit. This is especially helpful when making jam from berries. To begin, a small batch of fruit is boiled in sugar syrup for about a minute. The fruit is removed and set aside for later use.

The syrup and juice mixture is boiled down to reduce it. When it has reached the approximate concentration for the end product, another small batch of fruit is dropped into it, boiled for a minute, and the fruit is removed. Reduce the liquid again, and repeat as necessary until all the fruit has been cooked.

Add to the pot any juice that has drained from the fruit while it was set aside. Reduce the juice to its original volume. Only then do you add all the fruit back into the reduction. It is during this second cooking that the fruit reabsorbs the juice, gaining back its deep color and plumping back up.

The resulting product has only about half the weight of preserves, but the intensity of flavor is extraordinary. As the only sugar used in this method is at the very beginning, it is not unusually sweet, just very intensely flavored. After hot-packing the mixture in clean jars, process the jars in a water bath for fifteen minutes.