86) Make jam

When I added "make jam" to the list a long, long time ago it was at a time when stuff like that seemed out of reach for me. In my mind it would have taken going strawberry picking and spending a load of money, then wasting fresh fruit and inevitably messing up. Meeting and marrying Brandi changed a lot of those assumptions, for one I started picking wild-growing fruit. It seems stupid now to think I ever didn't. Though I still often have people ask whether it's okay to eat (one man was in shock that the cherries on a tree were okay to eat).

One afternoon my neighbours stopped by with a jar of jam they had made themselves... from blackberries! I was amazed that they did it. I haven't known many people to make jam. I hadn't even really considered it doing it myself yet. And I love blackberries. So on Sunday 22nd September 2019, as the blackberries were getting ready to fall, I decided to make jam.

With my wife and army of kids we went around the paths near us with a few baskets and bowls and collected berries, but I was too "in the zone" to take any pictures.

I don't like following recipes to the word. I never have. What I instead like to do is find a few recipes and figure out the main steps and do something along those lines. I couldn't find many recipes that specifically talked about blackberry jam, which turned out to be a problem because of something called pectin which occurs naturally in fruit. Depending on the fruit it's in different quantities - and it is pectin that makes it "jammy". Recipes for specific fruit would know about how much pectin there was naturally.

I (or a twinny) mashed the fruit, and then we boiled it and added sugar. It had to be boiled at a specific temperature for only a few minutes or risks losing the flavour. At that point you take a spoon of jam, put it on a plate and put it in the fridge. If after a few minutes it seems jelly-like it is done.

The first one didn't... boo. It either meant I didn't have enough pectin or I didn't boil it hot enough and for long enough. I tried the boiling again, but it still wasn't great.

I looked for alternatives to pectin, assuming that was the problem, and found that you can add lemon juice. So I added a load of that, and it seemed to work fine. After a celebration dance that the jam hardened up a little, I put the jam in glass jars I had collected over the months. It went much more jam-like in the jars over night too.

The following weekend I decided to have another go, but this time buy pectin. Funnily enough, the first batch was actually better.

Now, many months on, we still have some left (and that's after giving a few jars away). I've decided that I'll be doing this every year, partly to be frugal and save on jam, and partly because it tastes way nicer than store-bought jam.