When canning you really have to follow the rules. With jams, jellies and marmalades, tinker with the fruit/sugar/pectin/cooking time ratios at your own peril. The heartbreak of a batch that doesn't set is like getting a bad sunburn. You have that same kind of regret. Stupid me, I knew I should of put on sunscreen. Or measured that fruit more carefully.
Creative naming only gets you so far. If there's a little bit of thickness or the fruit is still in large pieces, you can squeak by by calling it a "conserve" since nobody really knows what that means. But when you churn out too many "syrups" people get wise to your failures.
And that's the least of it. Be a bigger rule breaker and you run the risk of the wrath of the big B — botulism. Imagine, "Merry Christmas, I made this myself!" ending up with a funeral. Yikes!
The upside of jams, jellies, pickles and relishes is they are less likely breeding grounds for this evil bacteria, as opposed to recipes calling for low-acid or low sugar solutions.
So now of course I'm going to contradict myself. Now and then I've found wiggle room with spices and flavorings. A couple of summers ago I saw an ad in the Indian edition of Good Housekeeping for strawberry-mint jam, so I gave that a go. No one died but no one liked it either. Steve served my jams at our old B+B, Georgica Bend (a story for another day). The strawberry-mint was not a big mover. Too bad since mint is the scourge of the garden. Why oh why won't the deer eat that?
This week I tried a new twist. Though double batches of jam are not recommended as it increases the likelihood of a bad set, I get away with it if I'm really precise. I piggy-backed the recipe for field-ripe local strawberry jam with a blueberry jam recipe and threw in the long thin strips of zest from one orange. The zest worked as a flavor booster, making the fruit fruitier without asserting its own flavor.
Perfection.
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I left the fruit in big chunks. Strawberries hulled and cut in half, only half of the blueberries crushed in advance so the final product still has some whole ones. This is a little walk on the wild side too, as recipes for jam say you should mush up everything pretty well first. But the pleasure of being able to recognize the fruit and enjoy it in big bites is worth it.
The recipes for strawberry and blueberry jam are included in all the commercial pectins, like Certo and Sure Jell and Ball.
To sum it all up, a judicious amount of zest in a jam worked wonders for me. But as I'm not a certified expert, I must say do not try my original gourmet recipe at home. So come on over, or tell me you'd like some. I love giving my jams to appreciative audiences.
