Jamming

<fruit+sugar=omnomnom>

I happened to be at the Wednesday market around 4pm this week when they had started getting rid of the leftover fruit and veg at dumping prices, and thus managed to get hold of four punnets of strawberries for a mere quid. That could mean only one thing - JAM.
(Well, it could also have meant strawberry gin, but as I have mentioned before, I am less alcohol- and more sugar-oriented than some of the contributors on this blog.)
Making jam is so simple that I really cannot understand why more people don't make their own, especially since it means you can cater to your own preferences when it comes to sugar content, size of fruit pieces, or additional flavourings you may want to add.


In any case, 20 minutes of hulling later I had 1.5kg of strawbs ready to go.

I am at the moment, for various health reasons, trying to avoid sugar, especially refined sugar, and since I LOVE jam, especially my own homemade one, this  this has been somewhat tough at breakfast. On a recent visit to Germany however I bought some low-sugar gelling agent, designed to be used with only 350g of sugar per 1kg of fruit, or even without any sugar, so that you can easily substitute fructose or sweetener. Sweetener alone tends to leave a bit of a bad taste, so I decided to use half fructose, half sweetener.

 My favourite jam EVER is strawberry with stem ginger, so that's what the first 1kg batch was going to be. 

I also like my jam as smooth as possible, none of that real big fruit pieces malarkey for me, so I pureed the strawberries with the stem ginger before cooking the jam.

And because I was feeling adventurous, I added some balsamic vinegar and some ground black pepper to the second, smaller batch. And because I had then run out of strawberries but had still half a packet of gelling agent left, I used up an elderly jar of Morello cherries, spiced up with Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum.

The gelling agent worked a total treat in any combination of fruit sugar and sweetener - I use a pre-chilled saucer from the freezer for my gelling tests, and the jam set in less than a minute on the cold saucer. 

I use my mum's (and apparently every German housewife's) trick for sterilising the jars by simply filling them as much as possible and then turning them upside down for a few minutes, so that the boiling jam heats up the entire jar and sterilises it automatically - simples! 

Result of an hour's work, from left to right: three jars of Strawberry and Stem Ginger, one of Morello Cherry and Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum, and two (well, one and three quarters) of Strawberry, Aceto Balsamico and Black Pepper, which I am really looking forward to trying with cheese.