Elderberry and Apple Jam experiment

To-ing and fro-ing The Hut (our office which was a chicken/pig house once upon a time)I pass an elder bush/tree. It is laden with elder berries. Up early one morning, and it was time to be bold and do a bit of wild foody-ing. Being of the thinking that produce bought from a supermarket or a market is viable food, and that if something is grown from a seed packet which looks the same as the photo or drawing on the packet then that is OK to eat as well, I have a natural nervousness about eating food from the wild. Now I know that the elder is not exactly growing wild, but it is still not an organised type of food. Last year I managed to avoid the elder berry project. This year I couldn't. Time to be bold and take one more step with wild foody-ing type self sufficiency.

I cut the umbrells of elderberries off, and weighed them. I didn't want to be greedy and take more than my needs. Wild foody-ing is about being aware that everything else is needing the food as well, like the birds, wasps, ants, etc, so all I was going to take was the quantity that I needed, and nothing more:

I separated the elderberries from the stalks by using a fork thus:

Then put them into a bowl of water. The unripe berries floated to the top:

All prepped. I had already found an easy recipe in Marguerite Patten's Jams, Preserves and Chutneys, (ISBN 1-902304-72-1, and my instinct told me to head for Elderberry and Apple Jam rather than just Elderberry Jam:

1lb (450g) Cooking Apples (weight when peeled and cored)
3 tablespoons of water
1lb (450g) Elderberries
2lb (900g) Sugar (I used preserving sugar)
2 tablespoons Lemon Juice (I put the juice from 1 lemon in)

As you can see, an easy recipe.

1) Cube apples into small pieces, and into pan with the water. Simmer for 10 minutes.
2) Add elderberries, continue cooking until soft. Actually I neglected to read the cooking method, and put the elderberries and apples in all together. It didn't seem to make much difference.
3) Add sugar and lemon juice, stir over low heat until the sugar has dissolved then boil rapidly until setting point is reached.
Well, did just that, and did a setting test within a couple of minutes. Now my method for testing for set is to take the pot of jam off the heat, stir a large long handled spoon round in the jam so that it is well coated, then go outside, wave the spoon about a bit so it cools down rapidly, and if the jam is set it will hang in a nice blob from the spoon.

The jam did that, much to my surprise. Wow, I thought. This is easy. Not like the marrow and ginger jam I made the other day which never did set properly but made a gorgeous syrupy compot that is great for putting over the surface of a cake just out of the oven, so is still usable.

So I decanted the jam from the pot into the warm jars, and sealed them down, with a half a jar left over for testing for taste.

It never set. ***** I thought. Tasted OK though, like the apple and blackberry jam my Mum made when I was young.

Ten days later, and I had a window of opportunity to address the four pots of jam and sort their contents out. Back into the pan the non-set jam went, to be boiled for about 7 - 10 minutes. This time it has set.

Things I have learnt: That testing for set on a backing hot summer day by waving a spoon about is not going to give an accurate result, mainly because the sun will bake the jam onto the spoon before the jam has time to run off.
That jam is easy to make: if it doesn't set and stays runny just pop it back into the pan and give it another boil through. Even if there is a time gap of several days this still seems to work.
That I am pleased that I have taken another step towards wild foody-ing!

Marrow Ginger jam

Oh yummy yums. Had to share this recipe with you although there is room for improvement in my making of it. It's taken from 'What will I do with all those courgettes?' by Elaine Borish. ISBN 0952488159

This is my first year of the courgette experience and already I have been caught out by a couple of specimens which seem to have gone at a mighty gallop of growth. So, a quick look through this book and I found the jam recipe.

You need:
4lbs (2kg) peeled, seeded, then cubed, marrow.
3lbs (1 1/2 kg) Preserving sugar
1oz (30g) root ginger. Crushed. I did this by first peeling the ginger, then putting it into a plastic bag before bashing it with Hub's hammer. And perhaps wiser to put a cloth in between the hammer and the bag. I didn't and I got a squelch as a result when the bag burst open. But ginger is easy to scoop back together, unless you are bashing the bag with a hammer on the ground outside. Then you will have to be careful of gathering up any other detritus with your squashed ginger. The hammer cleaned up quite easily though.
3 large lemons, thinly peeled rind and juice. I couldn't peel my lemons, so I used a gadget which gives the peel a grated texture.
You will also need: A thick bottomed saucepan, a large spoon, and endless patience. This is quite a long winded jamming experience. Plus you will need a muslin bag to put the ginger in, and the lemon peel. I didn't have a muslin bag so I cut a circle out of an old piece of voile, put the ginger in the centre of it, then brought all the edges together, fixing them firmly into place with an elastic band. The recipe says put the lemon peel in as well, but I thought I would save the lemon gratings and pop them in to add extra texture later on.

1) Put marrow pieces in bowl with one third of the sugar, and leave to stand overnight. Haven't the faintest idea why one should do this, but did as instructed.

2) Into saucepan goes everything. Bring to the boil slowly, making sure the sugar is dissolved.
3) Continue to boil steadily until marrow looks transparent. Mine never did.
4) Taste after 15 minutes to adjust flavour, removing muslin bag if necessary.
5) Cook until setting point is reached.

Well, I boiled and boiled away for ages, testing frequently but the mixture didn't seem to want to oblige and turn itself into jam.

I originally thought that this was a large pot of jam to be making, but it takes so long to set that it is best to start off with a large quantity of mix because a lot of that is going to evaporate away.

I kept testing the mix, leaving the ginger in for most of the cooking time because it didn't seem to be too invasive to the taste.

I popped in the lemon gratings towards the end, when the ladle I was using to occasionally stir the mix starting dragging as I moved it round the saucepan signalling that things were starting to thicken. I'm not sure whether you should stir boiling jam, but I am cooking on a caravan stove, and can only heat up one side of my saucepan leaving the other side to be off the boil.

Finally, after ages and ages, I decided that it was as set as it was ever likely to be. Denise over at Much Marlarkey Manor had already warned me that her marrow jam took a while to set, and that it was of a consistency which dribbled off her toast. This type of jam has to be eaten with care, since the drip factor is high enough to leave runnels down the chin and from thence onto the bosoms if one has them. Or one's lap, or over one's hand and up one's sleeve, or onto the table, or floor, or dog. This is a messy type of jam, but no less enjoyable.

Anyway, I decanted about four and a half pots, the marrow sitting in suspension quite happily making me believe that the jam would stiffen as it cooled. It didn't.

So onto the Internet to see why this was. No help anywhere, apart from the advice that it would take upwards of two hours at simmer to set. Someone on a forum had fetched up with the same lose jam, and had reboiled it after which it had set. An investigation into my old cookbook gave me the info that the end of season marrow is best for jamming.

So: I jammed a marrow when it was too young. I didn't simmer the jam for long enough, but boiled it instead which risked giving a singed taste to the jam as the sugar got fed up and burnt. And I didn't feel like reboiling it, because the caravan is a very hot place to be making jam in especially if the jam is going to take hours to reach set. The heat from the stove added to the heat from the sun, makes the caravan a place which is needed to be evacuated from.

But: this jammy syrup, which is what I ended up with, is gorgeous. I keep having a swig of it as I pass by, and as I said in my blog today, entitled 'We had a bit of a blowing' (17 July 2009) over on 'Snippets from our smallholding', I am in danger of becoming a marrow and ginger jam junkie. I am going to have to put the pots away in the cupboard, out of sight, otherwise I will keep on dipping my fingers into it to sample the delightful taste.

Lessons I have learnt: That I love ginger.
That lemon bits in jam are superb.
That this is a recipe which has potential.
That one can always clean the kitchen, do a bit of crocheting, file one's nails, and wash the kitchen ceiling while waiting for the jam to reach setting point.
That one can always use this syrupy jam for putting over things, like puddings and yoghurts, or in my case, as a comfort food!

And here's a spare pot of jam for you!

25.07.09. I have been using this jam on the top of cakes, and in rice puddings. The pieces of marrow have now turned gingery in taste, and the stickiness on top of cakes gives an unusual flavour. Drizzle the jam on before the cake goes into the oven, and / or drizzle it once out of the oven.

Jamming: Granulated sugar or Preserving sugar?

"Here's some plums. Do you want to take them to make some jam?" Sara a friend of mine said, as she thrust a bowl of quickly ripening wild plums into my hands, "And here is some sugar as well" she finished off with, handing me a bag of Confisuc sugar.

Since I am living in France, and the sugar was bought from a French supermarket, the bag of sugar was, of course, written in French. I can use lose transation, but decided not to on this occasion, and took pot luck with the normal one to one sugar to fruit recipe.

So on and past the rolling boil stage, and crikey! The jam was set in a matter of minutes!

Onto the next batch of fruit, curtesy of Sara again. This time I used granulated sugar. The fruit took forever to set, and reduced to nearly half the amount of jam that the first batch had made.

'Something wrong here' I thought. Better have an investigation of the Confisuc sugar. A friend was phoned up. "Oh yes," she said, "That's conserving sugar, especially for jams".

I looked on the back of the packet, and did a translation of sorts. She was right. Now in the UK, when undertaking jam making projects, I always used granulated sugar plus a lemon if the recipe said so. Never preserving sugar. My jams were OK, but then I didn't make huge amounts of them and anyway, it was a long time ago. Actually, come to think of it, the likelihood is that preserving sugar wasn't available at the time anyway. As I say, it was a long time ago.

So I go off to the supermarket to buy some of this Confisuc sugar which seems to make jam making a doddle, only to find that it was double the price of the granulated.

Being on a budget I bought the granulated instead, did a bout of jam making only to find that the jam took ages to set and didn't make more that two pots.

A phone call to my friend again. Her response was that she always used the Confisuc / preserving sugar because it saved electricity as it brought the jam to set quicker, and that it made a good amount of jam because the quicker setting time meant that the jam was not boiling for so long and therefore reducing its liquid content as a result. Yes, it was more expensive, but you gor that back in terms of more jam for your money, plus you didn't use so much fuel boiling the jam.

That seemed logical. So my next time of jam making I made a compromise: I used half and half preserving sugar to granulated sugar, but not because I was a skin-flint, but because I had run out of the Confisuc!

Jam OK.

Lessons I learnt: That it is better not to be a skin-flint when it comes to sugars, because the less time one has to deal with a boiling pot of jam the less time is the likelihood of getting singed by the splashing of the jam!
That it is best to keep a store of sugar in the cupboard if one is likely to be donated fruit by kindly neighbours, and that keeping the sugar in a plastic bag tends to confuse the errant ant who is having a recce in one's cupboard for lunch and reduces the possibility of opening the cupboard door later on to find all the ant and its friends all come round for dinner. This only really applies if one is living in a caravan. You're probably OK if you are living in a house.

PS. A conversation with Denise over at Much Marlarkey Manor produced the info that preserving sugar has pectin in it which apparently helps jam to set. Presumably Confisuc has it in as well, but have yet to wade through the writing on the packet to see if it actually does.