Sugar-free Blues

These blueberries could get by without any sugar, I thought to myself as I dumped two cups of the stuff into my jam pot.

And as I stirred, I thought about the people I know who love blueberries but don’t love—or can’t tolerate—sugar. What about them? Don’t they deserve jam too?

And why didn’t I buy more blueberries at the farmer’s market that Saturday morning? They were so sweet and delicious! Was I nuts? I suddenly understood that by leaving pints and pints of them behind in the market, I had done the wrong thing

So on Sunday morning, when I went to a different market and saw the same farmer with his blueberries, I bought another pint. “They’re so good,” I said. “What did you do, go out and sing to them every single day?”

“ Well,” he replied as he handed me my purchase, “somebody did something right.”

Sugar-free Blueberry Jam with Balsamico
2½ c blueberries (a heaping pint)
⅓ c water
3 T balsamic vinegar
4 t powdered pectin (find here or here)

Pick through the blueberries to remove any stems or junk. Wash them, drain, and put in a pot. Smush them up a little with a potato masher or two wooden spoons. Add the water and balsamic, then sprinkle the pectin over the berries.

Cook them over high heat, stirring constantly, until they boil hard. Boil a minute or two, then pour into two sterilized half-pint jars and seal with two-piece caps in a boiling water bath. Ten minutes ought to do it.

Easy, fun, and oh so right!

Jam Is Good

Left to right, vanilla pear (made with pectin) from Food in Jars; black plum; and Michigan peach.

Thus say I:

1. It is easy and fun to make jam;
2. It is fun to eat jam;
3. It is fun to say “jam.” Jam, jam, jam. Jam!

Therefore, I am going to make a boatload of jam this fall instead of/in addition to the too many pickles I usually make.
There are many schools of jam: hard-set jam, runny jam. Liquid pectin, powdered pectin, no pectin. Pounds of sugar; some sugar; no sugar. Sealed in a canner; sealed with paraffin. Cooked jam, freezer jam. I’ve been thinking a lot about all these jamways, their various pros and cons, and I have two working generalizations.

First, you can’t screw it up. If you make a good-faith effort and follow the steps, whatever you turn out will qualify as jam. It may be thin, it may be thick; but it will still fall in the jam gamut. The “jamut.” Snrrrrrk!

Second, all jam is good. Like all religions are good! There’s no right or wrong way to make jam, and there’s no right or wrong religion. They are all valid ways to worship fruit or deity, respectively. And there are many paths to thickness, too. Pectin will thicken jam, as will sugar and cooking down. Every one of them is good and right.

Except for my grandma’s recipe for zucchini jam made with cherry Jello. That’s where I draw the line. No, Grandma! That’s not jam. That’s an abomination of jam and Jello salad!

Basic Jam
Usually I am all for specifics, but jam is more a state of being for fruit. Seedy little fruits make jam that thickens nicely on its own. Fruits with little or no pectin will maybe need you to add some; or you may have to cook them down and they will acquire a hard-candy taste; or you can embrace softer jam. Ripe fruits have more flavor, but less pectin, than firm fruits.

Don't be scared! Let it boil hard.

I’ve gotten good results by measuring out ½ to ¾, even as much as 1, cup of sugar for every cup of chopped or crushed fruit; heat up the fruit to boiling; dump in the sugar and bring to a rolling boil; cook around 5 minutes, put in jars, and process in a hot water canner. You can also use wax, which you’ll find in the grocery store.



Directions very much like this are easy to find on many other Web sites and in books. For more reassurance on how jam becomes jam no matter what, see here.

Butter: Why Bother?

(with a note about cherries)

Y’all, this post is about butter, but the picture is not as big a bait and switch as you think. There’s a note at the bottom about cherry jam. Stay with me.

So it’s hardly an original idea to write about making butter. I read in the New York Times about a year ago that hotsy totsy Manhattan chefs were doing it. The Minneapolis Star Tribune plastered it all over the Taste section just weeks ago. If you Google “how to make butter,” you will come up with more than 39 million hits.

Why, Amy Boland, why would you bother to blog about butter?

Because it’s just so fun! It is so easy and so fun and you can’t screw it up. You don’t have to buy anything. Or you can use it as an excuse to buy everything. You could do it with your kids on a rainy day and then make cookies with it. Or you could do it by yourself on a barbecue day and show it off to your friends, who will not know it is easy and fun and will be all impressed.

If you want to do it with few purchases, then you only need heavy whipping cream and a lidded jar that you fish out of the recycling. (Get cream with no other ingredients, i.e. carrageenan.) If you want to use buttermaking as an excuse to buy a KitchenAid mixer with a dough hook, well then you just go on.
I went halvsies. I spent $7 on a bench knife that I secretly wanted to buy anyway. And I used Organic Valley cream and a bowl and my hand mixer.

Just beat or shake cream until it passes through the whipped stage, through the “Rrr! I overwhipped it” stage, and all the way until “What the hell? There’s milk in here!” Pour off the liquid (It’s buttermilk! Drink it! It’s not nasty like the kind in the store!). Rinse the solid in cold water until it runs clear. Shake it dry, or better yet knead it with a spoon against the side of a bowl, or with your new bench knife on the countertop, or on the brand new marble countertops that you had to have installed so that you could make butter. (See what I mean about excuses?) Use a clean kitchen towel to pat off the water as you go.

Mix in salt, or don’t. Mix in flavors, or don’t. Because it’s… easy and fun! You can’t screw it up!

On a total non sequitur, cherry jam! Oh boy! My family recipe for strawberry jam also works on raspberries and, as I just discovered, cherries too.

I used the sour cherries pictured above. I got them from Maple Leaf Orchard. If you get to the downtown St. Paul farmers market early enough on Saturday, August 8, you might be able to score a quart or two. Afton Apple sometimes has an extra flat you could pick up. Or maybe you, or a neighbor, have a North Star cherry tree growing in your yard. Or you could use sweet cherries, too, I guess.

I pitted a generous quart, chopped them very roughly (each cherry into 2-3 pieces), and omitted the lemon juice. I measured 3 cups of very juicy cherries. I boiled them hard for several minutes until they had reduced a bit, then carried on as usual—I had to cook the jam for six minutes before it would gel. The recipe yielded just over a pint. Holy intense cherry flavor!

Strawberry Jam!

Harmony Valley’s homegrown strawberries are ringing a bell for me. They are small, deep red, and dense. They’re reminding me of the wild strawberries my family used to pick when I was growing up on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range.

Every evening in midsummer, my mother would take a battered 1-quart Tupperware measuring cup out to the field a quarter mile down the road from our house. She would come back an hour or two later with varying amounts of wild strawberries—sometimes just a cup or two, sometimes the berries heaped up to make well over a quart. Someone who only knows supermarket strawberries would call them dry, seedy, and tiny; but each pea-sized berry packs an intense flavor.

We’d pick the caps off the berries, wash them, measure them, add sugar, and cook them into jam. We’d put it up in any old jar—peanut butter jars, mustard jars, sometimes proper canning jars—and top them off with melted paraffin to seal them. Eating that jam on a frigid winter morning was like seeing the past and the future at the same time. “It was summertime once,” I’d remember, “and someday it will be summer again.”

***

2-3 cups prepared berries (wash, hull, quarter)

1 1/4 to 2 cups sugar

A tablespoon of lemon juice

Measure the berries into a heavy pot. Add ¾ to 1 cup sugar per cup of berries. Add the lemon juice. Cook, stirring constantly, over high heat until the mix comes to a full rolling boil. Cook 4 minutes.

Test: drop some liquid on a cold plate. If you can swipe your finger through the jam and leave a clean streak on the plate, your jam is thick enough. Keep testing every minute; the jelling happens quickly. I wouldn’t cook more than seven minutes, regardless of what’s going on with the plate.

Take off the heat and stir down the foam. Pour the jam into sterilized jars, put on two-piece caps, and process in a boiling water bath. If you are not a canner, you can put the jam in any glass or ceramic container you like. Store it in the refrigerator.