Pear Jam with Rosemary

Last week we visited Lundulph's parents to celebrate their birthdays with a picnic in their garden. Before we could do this, Lundulph tried to pick as many of the apples and pears as he could from the two trees, which dominate the seating area and are quite lethal at this time of the year, dropping large fruit randomly. Now I still have some apples from last year in the freezer, but no pears, so this year, I collected a bag of the largest pears and took home with the plans of making some sort of preserve.

I'd seen a recipe somewhere in my paper-based collection, while searching for other things and was very intrigued by it. Pears aren't that common as jams. The recipe also involved star anise, which I have, but use extremely rarely, so another reason to try this. As often happens I wasn't able to find this recipe again, so I searched on the internet and there are a couple that came up and seemed fairly good, but I also found this one that had rosemary in it and seemed even better, so I decided to do this instead.

Ingredients

1.5 kg pears, after peeling and coring
1 tbsp lemon zest (2 small lemons)
2 dl water
1 sprig rosemary
3 dl granulated sugar
2 dl soft dark brown sugar
3 sachets pectin (16 g)
1 tsp citric acid

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 120°C and place several clean jam jars and their lids in there to heat up and steralise.
2. Dice the pears fairly finely, about 1 cm, and place in a deep casserole dish.
3. Add the lemon zest and water, stir through to combine and bring to the boil.
4. When the pears boil, cover the saucepan, reduce the heat and let simmer for 20 minutes.
5. Measure up the sugars and add the pectin, then stir well to mix.
6. Once the 20 minutes are up, add the sugar mixture and the rosemary sprigs and stir carefully, cover and let simmer for a further 10 minutes.
7. Remove from the heat, take out the rosemary sprigs and stir in the citric acid, then carefully mash with a potato masher or blend with a blender.
8. Taking out one jar at a time, fill it with jam and secure the lid tightly.
9. Allow the jam to cool down to room temperature, then store in the fridge for up to 6 months.

I now have about 1.75 litres of lovely stuff and from licking the spoon, I can tell you it was very tasty. The recipe recommends this with a cheese board, but I'm pretty sure it'll work lovely on toast. The only thing is that due to the dark brown sugar, the jam is sort of brown and the original recipe uses just granulated sugar, but I didn't have enough so had to improvise. I will need to try the other recipe with star anise as well, if I can get more pears from Lundulph's parents.

A week later we tried the jam with some freshly baked bread. As it turns out, the pear flavour is almost entirely lost and the rosemary dominated. Also the jam hadn't set, but was more like a very sweet purée, so I've adjusted the amounts above to reduce the rosemary and increase the pectin. Lundulph thought it was OK, but if I'd used apples instead of pears, he wouldn't have known the difference. He wasn't particularly impressed with the rosemary and reckons I should skip it next time. I disagree, but it does need to be less.

Given the consistency it's turned out to be, I'll try to turn some of it into ice cream with the aqua faba foam, it might be nice.

Rhubarb Jam Second Batch

Well I'm not sure what I did right this year, but the rhubarbs sprouted new leaves after I picked them earlier this year. Enough for a second batch of jam.

Looking at my entries before, I didn't write down details on what I did, so will do that now.

Ingredients
750 g trimmed rhubarb stalks
800 g jam sugar
8 g pectin (1 sachet)
2 dl water
1 tsp vanilla essence

1 tbsp lemon juice
20 g unsalted butter
2 tbsp punsch

Method

1. Place the jars in the oven on just over 100 degrees C.


2. Wash and dice the rhubarb and place in a large saucepan with a thick bottom.


3. Add the sugar, pectin, water and vanilla essence and stir round, then heat up on medium-low heat, stirring occasionally.


4. Boil until the rhubarb is soft and starts disintegrating and the setting point is reached, about 15 - 20 minutes.


5. Add the lemon juice, butter and punsch and stir in well, then remove from the heat.


6. Distribute into the hot jars, close the lids tightly and allow to cool.

Of course the punsch can be exchanged for a different liqueur or omitted altogether, like in the first batch. I actually used 0.5 dl and it was a bit over-powering, so I've reduced the amount. It's still very tasty though.

Raspberry Jam

The other day I had a big clear out of the freezer, it's been long overdue. I threw away quite a few things, mainly failed experiments that I couldn't bring myself to bin at the time. But then I did a lot of berry picking last Summer and had frozen in several ice cream boxes. So out they came and into my big pressure cooker to thaw. That took all day.



The next day I went to the supermarket bright and early and bought 1 kg of jam sugar. There was also preserving sugar, I couldn't quite work out the difference, certainly the price was almost the same, 1 penny difference there. But the packet of jam sugar said it was particularly for soft fruit that doesn't contain pectin, i. e. strawberries, raspberries etc.

I've made jam before, on two occasions, both well before I started this blog, thus they are not here. And thus nothing to refer back to. The sugar packet had some instructions and when I worked out my amounts it seems I had twice the amount of berries to the sugar I'd bought. Well, that's not a big deal, on the contrary, my Mum's been making jam with reduced amounts of sugar for years, works perfectly well.

Ingredients

2.7 l raspberries and wild strawberries
1 kg jam sugar
25 g unsalted butter
1.5 dl plum brandy liqueur

Method

1. Allow the berries to defrost completely, if frozen.


2. Place in a large saucepan and put on low heat, then add the sugar and stir in.


3. As the sugar dissolves, increase the heat little by little up to medium.


4. Bring the mixture to a boil and add the butter and stir in well.


5. Let boil for a few minutes, then add the brandy liqueur.


6. Let simmer for 20-30 minutes. In the mean time pre-heat glass jars in the oven at it's lowest setting.


7. When the jam is done, take out the jars and pour it quickly into them and close the lids tightly, then let cool before labelling up.

The reason I put the brandy liqueur in is because I'd had the bottle for ages and it didn't really taste very nice, so I thought this would be a good place to use it up. So completely optional this one.

I also made the mistake in thinking that the jam was way too watery after 25 minutes and left it simmering for a total of 50 minutes, when it had reduced to almost half. This was a mistake as it began to set extremely quickly and I just barely managed to pour it out into the jars. I got a total of 1.5 l jam.

It tasted very nice though, not extremely sweet, but had a bit of the raspberry tartness. Lundulph approved.

When I consulted my Mum, she said if the jam seems too thick, just add a bit of water. She also said this can be done even after it's been poured into the jars, it needs to be heated up first to loosen it up.

Äppelmos

As thanks for dinner, our neighbours gave us a bag full of wonderful large cooking apples. And I thought this is the perfect opportunity to try my hand at Swedish apple puree. Lundulph thought this is just like the English apple sauce, but sweeter. In Sweden it's served with pancakes or porridge and it's not as sweet as jam.

I picked out a number of recipes and decided on this one (in Swedish), as it didn't involve freezing in the end. Freezing is the thing it seems, even my Mum does it - she saves milk cartons, washes them and fills them up with the puree, then freezes the whole lot.

Ingredients
cooking apples - resulting in 1.5 kg after peeling and removing damaged bits.
1.5 dl water
2 g vitamin C powder (ascorbic acid)
1.5 dl maple syrup
0.5 dl caster sugar
5 cm long cinnamon sticks, one for each jar.

Method

1. 1.5 kg apples will result in approximately 1 litre of puree, so get a sufficient number of glass jars and place in the oven and "bake" at 120 degrees for at least 20 minutes, to sterilise them.


2. Wash, peel and core the apples, removing any damaged bits you can find. Put the pieces in a big bowl of water so they don't discolour.


3. Place the apples in a saucepan, add the water, put a lid on and let simmer for 10 minutes, until they go a bit mushy.


4. At this point, one or more large saucepans or casserole dishes are needed, large enough to take in the glass jars. Line them with a towel, pour in water and bring to the boil.


5. When the apples are done, drain away the water, then mash up with a fork or a blender. It doesn't have to be perfectly smooth.


6. Stir in the vitamin C powder, maple syrup and sugar. Note that the maple syrup is mainly to add to the flavour and the sugar is to provide the sweetness. The amounts should be varied to taste.


7. Now take out the glass jars and fill up with the apple puree, leaving about 2 cm from the top edge of each jar.

Push a cinnamon stick into the middle of each jar, then put on the lid and screw it shut, but not too tightly.

8. Place the jars in the saucepans with boiling water, the water should reach about three quarters of the height of the jars. Then let simmer for at least 20 minutes.


9. Check the jar lids that they have been sucked in and formed a vacuum. If not, let simmer for a bit longer.


10. Take out of the saucepans, then let cool and label up. Of course if you can't be bothered with this, just let cool after stirring in the sugar, pour into freezable boxes or bags and freeze.

The proportions are 1 kg apples to 1 dl of water to 1 g of vitamin C powder. I just used 2 g as my scales can't do half gram measurements. The purpose of it is as antioxidant to prevent discolouring, I think.

Some of the recipes also called for Sodium Benzoate, also known as E211, which is a food preservative. I'm not sure if this can be purchased in shops though.

One recipe mentioned adding Calvados. I've never had that, so I don't know what it tastes like. I couldn't think of any other spirit/liqueur that might taste nice with apples, but decided to add maple syrup instead of just regular sugar and I think that works very nicely indeed. I have some doubts about a whole cinnamon stick in a jar, that might ruin everything, so will come back with an update in a few weeks' time when I've opened the puree.

As you can see in the photos, I filled two half litre jars and I had about 3 more dl, two of which I put in a glass and one I gave to Lundulph to eat. The glass didn't go into the boiling saucepan, so it's now in the fridge and should last at least one week. One of the two jars sealed up nicely after 20 minutes (the one with the green lid). The other took a further 33 minutes and some additional lid tightening and it still hadn't been sucked in. But it was nearing bedtime, so I took it out and set it to cool. After about half an hour, I noticed that the lid had been sucked in. Just to be on the safe side, I've put it in the fridge. The green lidded jar is in the larder, it should last longer hopefully.

On the whole, this recipe appealed (appled, hi, hi) to me because of the way the jars were sealed. I have vague memories of my Mum and Gran doing this on my Grandparents' allotment, where all sorts of fruits and vegetables were done that way in preparation for the Winter.