The sweet aroma of cooked fruit filling your kitchen is one of the trademark scents of summer. Yet attaining the perfect consistency for homemade jam can be difficult to master. Often it ends up a watery mess or over-solidifies into thick mystery goo that is destined for the trash, not topping your toast. Perfecting your jam-making skills takes time and patience, but you absolutely can produce jam that your grandmother would be proud of. Before we go into the tried-and-true jam hacks, let's discuss the number one element that matters in jam making: pectin.
This polysaccharide is naturally present in fruit and helps give jam its trademark gelatinous consistency when heated with sugar. Not all fruit are created equal, though; they contain different levels of pectin. If your chosen fruit is lacking in the pectin department, adding purchased pectin will save the day. Now that we got that out of the way, here are 10 jam hacks that will help you navigate the often tricky and guaranteed sticky process of jam-making.
Scoop up a bit of jam with a spoon and let it drip back into the pot. If the jam slides easily off the spoon, then it still needs time to stew. If it takes its sweet time shimmying off the spoon, then it's almost a done deal. Spreadable but loose, almost like a compote. Flavourings wise, lemon is crucial here to retain the vibrant colour of the berries. Cooking has the tendency to mar their beautiful redness but lemon juice counters that.
Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Instructions If some of the strawberries are bigger, chop them up to roughly the same size pieces.
If using a vanilla bean, halve it lengthwise. After maceration, fruit becomes something new, a complex mingling of flavors and textures.
The soft fruit and liquid have many uses: a tasty dessert on its own topped with a dollop of whipped cream; a sauce for ice cream or cake; or a filling for pie or a cake where it adds not only flavor, but color and moisture. Osmosis is a process in which a fluid flows through a semipermeable membrane such as a cell wall from an area of lower concentration to one of higher concentration. Salt and sugar are two of the most common catalysts for osmosis, so putting either ingredient into your maceration mixture will trigger the process.
When either comes in contact with food, it works to reach a state of equilibrium with the water content of the food itself to balance the concentration of the salt or sugar in the solution, so beginning the process of osmosis; available water contained within the cells of the fruit is drawn out.
The loss of water from the fruit causes it to soften; it also concentrates its natural flavors. Sugar is hygroscopic, meaning that it attracts and bonds with water. When you macerate with sugar, the water in the fruit is drawn out into the surrounding sugar. Liquids for maceration include liquors, liqueurs, wine, fruit juice, vinegars, and water that may and in the case of water must be infused with all sorts of flavorings, like spices, herbs, tea, and coffee.
Liquids for maceration are sometimes heated to hasten the process or to infuse flavors prior to maceration see below but maceration does not require the application of heat.
Liquids that have already been infused with flavor provide the fastest flavor transfer to the macerating fruit. However, alcohol extracts flavor really effectively. When using a liquid with a high alcohol content, such as whiskey, you can add any mix of whole spices, aromatics, or other flavorful solids because their flavors will be extracted without heating. The length of time for macerating fruit can vary from about 30 minutes to a couple of days. I also prefer less-refined organic sugar.
The only downside with less refined sugar is that it is necessary to skim the jam during boiling a lot more carefully. This makes sense, because the foam that comes to the top of boiling jam is in fact the impurities from the sugar. Skimming these impurities out gives a sparkling clear finished jam.
It should be no surprise that less refined sugar has more impurities to be skimmed off. Macerating v Cooking The simplest way to minimize the cooking time for jams is to macerate first.
When fruit is tossed with sugar and left to rest, the sugar begins breaking down the fruit in a way that resembles cooking but without the loss of fresh taste. Depending of the firmness of the fruit, Ferber recommends macerating the fruit raw with the sugar, or bringing the sugar and fruit to a boil together very briefly then leaving it to macerate overnight. A trick for cutting parchment to the right shape. Boiling briefly with sugar before leaving to macerate overnight.
To Thicken or not to Thicken Time was people liked a thick jam heck that still might be today. One can also add sources of natural pectin, like lemon pith. Or one can just get good with a looser jam. In any case, simply boiling the fruit and sugar together will give a certain amount of body to jam. Further boiling will increase the thickness. I find that for most fruits, minutes of hard boiling gives enough set without compromising the flavor.
The easiest way to check the set is to put a spoonful of cooked jam onto a cold plate I keep plates in the freezer while making jam for this purpose. This will allow you to get a clear idea of how thick the jam will be when it cools.
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