9.3.12

Whateverberry jam

Our yard is full of berries. Apart from the raspberries outside our back door, they mostly look self-sown and we have no idea what some of them are. Picking and eating them is just another part of the adventure that is our yard - some of them taste like sweet rosewater, some of them are face-puckering. They include raspberries, boysenberries and loganberries. Over the summer we picked them whenever they were ripe and if we didn't eat them all then we froze them. Loganberries are not very sweet so they are better for cooking or turning into jam and mostly got frozen. We never really knew what we were picking though.

The berries from our garden thawing

We also have a mulberry tree (yay!). Between the birds and the wind, not many ripe mulberries made it into human hands.  The ones that did were huge and delicious and were gobbled immediately, thus not making it into the freezer for the jam.

mulberry

Apart from the berries from our garden we also went picking blackberries near New Norfolk, and our neighbour Hilary gave us some blackberries she had picked too. It was around 3kg of very yummy fruit just waiting to be jammed.

Jam Recipe
1050g random berries from our garden
600g blackberries picked by our neighbour, Hilary, on her walk last week
1200g blackberries picked by us near New Norfolk on the weekend
bucket load of sugar (equal weight to the fruit)
plus lemon juice or crab apples (for pectin)

Then do the jam thing - boil, add sugar, boil some more until it is ready to set.

After adding the sugar.
We made one batch using lemon juice to set the jam and then another using crab apple. We have a crab apple tree and the fruit is notoriously high in pectin.  In fact you can make a pectin stock with them. Instead of using stock we just cut a few (unripe) crab apples in half, wrapped them in some muslin and added them to the pot with the berries.  Both jams set well, but the crab apple assisted one came together much more quickly.

The goodies
7 x 300ml jars
8 x 230ml jars

Some of the loot cooling down
The jam is very yummy and there was heaps of it. We have added it to the the cupboard with the cherry plum jam we made earlier and a few odd leftovers from previous years. 

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