Cran-Rasp-Orange-Berry Jam

Inventing new jam flavor combinations and cleaning the freezer go hand in hand, at least for me. This recipe resulted from having a bag of frozen raspberries from last year's harvest and a container of a cranberry-orange sauce I made for a family meal that produced more than we could eat. I've seen cran-raspberry juice in the store and this seemed like a natural combination. My search for recipe inspiration confirmed the idea.

Two things I think about in jam inventions: naturally occurring pectin in the fruits and berries I'm using, and overall acidity in the recipe for safe canning. I'll read a recipe written for a single ingredient like raspberries to learn whether that jam can set without added pectin. If it can, then something with more natural pectin should marry quite nicely. I don't want to use pectin because I don't want my jam to end up like a block of gelatin.

Two charts I found to help with this particular combination: A UK pectin and acidity chart that doesn't include raspberries(!) and an article from Fruits Knowledge World that focuses on pectin and provides a helpful summary bullet list.

Another handy spot: CoolConversion to calculate how many ounces or grams or cups you have when you have the measurement in some other metric. This came in handy figuring out that my 6 cups of frozen raspberries was just a tad more than the 30 ounces in the Food in Jars recipe below.

Source recipes

  • Cranberry Orange Sauce, A Mindfull Mom (pause your ad blocker for the site to load)
  • Cranberry Raspberry Jam, Food in Jars: Genuinely didn't find this until after I had my frozen sources defrosted and was working on ratios. She uses fresh cranberries with frozen raspberries.
Ingredients
  • Cranberry Orange Sauce, 2 cups. If you don't have this on hand, follow the Food in Jars Cranberry Raspberry Jam recipe and add the orange zest, OJ concentrate, cinnamon and nutmeg from the sauce recipe
  • Frozen raspberries, 6 cups, which is close to the 30 oz. in the Food in Jars recipe
  • White sugar, 2-1/2 cups
  • Triple Sec or other orange-flavored liqueur, 2-4 T. (optional)

Defrost the frozen ingredients. What you do next depends on whether you're starting with fresh or frozen cranberries instead of the sauce, which has already been cooked and has broken down the cranberry skins.

If all ingredients are whole, not precooked, mix them with the sugar and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to medium heat and cook. If you're starting with the leftover cranberry orange sauce, you could give the raspberries 10 minutes of cook time, then add the sauce. Doesn't hurt to just dump it all in and start, though.

Stir frequently until the jam thickens, approximately 25-27 minutes total. 

Toward the end of the cook time, stir in the Triple Sec if you're adding it. It doesn't add a strong orange flavor; I just find it fun to add, but it isn't needed. Taste and adjust. Spices don't affect food safety or canning time. Do you want a stronger hint of cloves? Another spoon of OJ concentrate or more orange zest?

Follow safe canning practices from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. Process the jars in a boiling water bath, starting the timer when the water returns to a full boil after you lower the jars in.

Yield: 4 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

I usually include pictures of beautiful jars full of deliciousness. This time I'm showing some of the wreckage from running a jam batch alongside an applesauce batch.



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Plum Jam Spice-Plus Recipe

Food in Jars provides a lot of great recipes for small-batch canning. I often size up because I have a bunch of something. Sometimes I have less than the quantity called for and adjust a recipe down rather than up. That was the case with the Spiced Plum Jam. I had some frozen plums, a few fresh, and a handful or two of honeyberries I threw in to use them up.

Ratios are my friend here. Fruit:sugar 1:1? No problem. Scaling spices down can be tricky if I end up with something like 1/3 teaspoon. I round down and taste since it's easy to add, impossible to take away. I look at how much lemon juice the recipe calls for as a contribution to pectin. 

But wait...

Two source recipes:

  • Spiced Plum Jam: Fruit:Sugar 4 lbs:4 cups. 1 lemon juice/zest, which means 2 T. juice. 1-1/2 t. cinnamon and 1/2 t. nutmeg, so 2 t. total spice for this quantity of plums.
  • Plum Jam with Cardamom: Fruit:Sugar 5 lbs.:4 cups. 2 T. lemon juice, 1 t. cardamom
Higher sugar ratio in recipe #1, higher spice too, and I want to combine these because I love all three spices and they mesh well.

I also have 2.75 pounds of plums plus honeyberries. Some of those plums are a bit on the green side.

Pro tip: If you're going to freeze a bunch of plums with plans for future jam, dice them first. When I defrosted my plums I had plum mush. I ended up using kitchen scissors to cut them into chunks in a bowl. This felt harder than chopping them quickly last fall would have.
Plum Jam Spice-Plus, No Pectin

The "plus" here could be adjusting the spice profile to suit your taste. Spice proportions don't affect the jelling process. It could also represent throwing in something besides plums if, like me, you have a small amount of something to use up.

Plums are relatively high in pectin. Between that and the use of lemon juice, you shouldn't need pectin to get a set.
  • Plums (plus): 2.75-3 pounds of pitted plums, sliced into thin half moons or chopped
  • Sugar: 2.75 pounds
  • Lemon juice: 2 T.
  • Cinnamon: 1 t.
  • Cardamom: 1/2 t.
  • Nutmeg: 1/4 t.
  • Cloves: Dash

Mix plums and sugar in a nonreactive bowl or post and let them sit for an hour or more to macerate. You could do this the night before if you remember. I didn't. It's fine. Honestly, if you forgot completely just start. 

Stir the spices together in a small dish, then sprinkle a bit and stir into the plums, sprinkle and stir, sprinkle and stir, until you've blended in all the spices. This extra step gives you more even distribution of the flavors. 

Alternatively, you can mix the spices into the sugar and add them all together.

Add the lemon juice. 

Cooking: Bring the ingredients to a boil over high heat, stirring. Lower to medium-high heat and cook at a low boil for 30-35 minutes, until the plums soften and the syrup thickens. When you hold the spoon up on its side, the syrup will run down in slow drips that run together rather than liquidy waterlike drops.

Canning set-up: Prep your canning jars and equipment. When you're ready to start cooking it's a good time to put a baking pan of jars into the oven at 200 degrees and get the big canning pot of water started heating up.

Fill and process: Using a funnel, fill jars, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a damp paper towel. Dip the lids in the boiling water to sterilize, then put them on the jars and tighten to fingertip tight (which means not screwed super tight because air needs to be able to escape). 

Process 15 minutes, starting the timer once the water comes back to a full boil after you lower the jars into the water. 

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 3 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints

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Heating It Up: Hot Pepper Jelly and Blackberry Chocolate Chili Jam

I really love a sweet/hot combo, don't you? Or sweet/tangy, for when I go deep on chutney. I've had a couple of bags of peppers in the freezer for quite a while and it was time. One of them, a gift from a Buy Nothing friend, was a bunch of green, yellow and red bell peppers, already seeded and cut in half, ready to use for pepper jelly. I had bags of mixed peppers I froze from last year's harvest, now all a mystery because I don't remember how hot they all are. Oops. I knew some were jalapeños, some pepperoncinis (thanks to the wrinkles), those red ones might be Fresnos which are hotter. Basically, a mystery grab bag.

Off to Chili Pepper Madness, where I went down a rabbit hole of various thing I could do with all those hot peppers, and a side trip to Food in Jars. Linking to all these as future inspiration:

This time around, I want hot pepper jelly, ready to put on a cracker with some Cougar Gold cheese or to zing up a sandwich. Plus, that uses up all those bell peppers just taking up freezer space.

Pepper Jelly Recipe it was.

The recipe calls for 4-5 cups of chopped peppers in whatever combo you want, a mix of sweet and hot. Frozen peppers do kind of turn into mush when you chop in the food processor, which is the fastest possible way, but that's okay. I didn't want to go over the top on hot peppers either. I sliced the tip off a few of them to check hotness (okay, that one's a Fresno!) and ended up with 2+ cups of sweet pepper, 2 cups of mild to hot pepper.

Yield: 9 half-pints, one quarter pint. Good heat with a noticeable burn but not one that punishes you for tasting. 


On to my next adventure in putting a bit of heat in a jar: Blackcurrant Jam with Chocolate and Chili from Larder Love.

A couple of tweaks:

  • Subbed in blackberries for blackcurrants. I do have a currant bush but it produces too few to turn into jam. I live in western Washington so, y'know, blackberries. Since they're super seedy, I first warmed them up a bit, then mashed part of the batch through a sieve to do a "reduced seeds" (not seedless) jam.
  • Larder Love calls for shaving an actual bar of chocolate, 70% cacao, into the jam. I'd already made Chocolate Cherry Jam, which simply used cocoa powder, and it was fantastic. I thought about saving the dark chocolate for actual eating, but decided to make the recipe as written this first time around. (Because who could resist making something like this again, right?) I saved myself the shaving step because I got dark chocolate chips.
  • She doesn't do hot-water bath canning; she's in the UK. I do and just follow standard jam timing.

I had a really big quantity of blackberries. Two evenings of picking gave me 4-3/4 yogurt cartons (my standard picking container; easy to carry a few in my bike pannier and make a stop when I spot ripe fruit). This turned out to be 1,883 grams (weighed after I had put about one-third of the berries through a sieve to mash out some of the seeds). Adjusting Larder Love's recipe quantities and doing some tasting for heat, I arrived at this recipe. You can shift quantities by maintaining ratios or go back to her recipe.

Blackberry Chocolate Chili Jam

  • Blackberries: 1,883 grams, or around 10 cups
  • Sugar: 1,130 grams (60% of berry weight)
  • Lemon juice: 3-3/4 T.
  • Chili flakes: 2-1/4 t. (increased from 1-3/4 t. I started with, which was the multiplier of her quantity)
  • Dark chocolate chips or grated dark chocolate bar, at least 70% cacao: 226 grams
I worked over roughly 1/3 of the blackberries to mash them through a sieve to eliminate seeds. That's a lot of work, which is why the rest of the blackberries went in whole. Fiber's good for you, after all.

Mix together the blackberries, sugar, lemon juice, and chili flakes and stir until the sugar dissolves. Bring ingredients to a boil over high heat and mash them with a potato masher to break the blackberries up. Stir in the dark chocolate chips or shavings, then reduce the heat to medium-high and keep stirring until the jam shows evidence of jelling. It will turn syrupy, and a spoon held on its side will have blackberry syrup running off it in slower drops, not watery like juice. For me this took around 35-40 minutes.

Canning prep: Start this when you bring the blackberries to a boil. Put a baking pan of jars into the oven at 200 degrees and get your canning kettle water to a boil.

Fill and process: Using a funnel, fill jars, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a damp paper towel. Dip the lids in the boiling water to sterilize, then put them on the jars and tighten to fingertip tight. Process 15 minutes, starting the timer once the water comes back to a full boil after you lower the jars into the water. 

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 6 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

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Green Tomato Caponata Recipe

I realized/rediscovered that I had around 7 pounds of frozen green tomatoes left from last year's harvest. (This is what happens when your garage holds both a full-sized freezer and the old fridge with a freezer space you don't look into very often.)

I'm still more than fully stocked up with green tomato chutney and have full confidence that I'll end up with more green tomatoes at the end of this year's gardening. Last year I experimented with a chutney sauce and (unsuccessfullly) with green tomato ketchups (never again!).

This year it's caponata. I've made this before when I ended up with eggplant from a Buy Nothing source. It's delicious on pasta, rice, or bread as a chunky dip.

Sources: Two recipes, one not designed for canning that's essentially a caponata pickle, one that calls for ripe tomatoes and is tested for canning, made with different quantities of tomatoes.

Things I did:
  • Increased the sugar the Ball recipe called for because I was using green tomatoes instead of ripe. For 7 lbs. of green tomatoes I used 3 T. brown sugar, 4 T. white sugar, basically 1 T. per pound/cup of tomatoes.
  • Working with frozen tomatoes, most of them cherry or grape size, I gave up on the idea of removing the skins. I know, I know, you're supposed to take them off. 
    • Pro tip/note to self: In future freezing frenzy at the end of a long growing season, blanch tomatoes and pull the skins off, then chop before freezing. You'll thank yourself.
  • I wanted the balsamic of the pickle recipe. I checked my (store brand) balsamic and it's 6% acidity. In the step where I sauteed onion, bell pepper, and celery, I used 1/4 c. balsamic in place of the 1/4 c. water the Ball recipe calls for. I honestly don't know if the flavor came through, given the strong flavors of all the other ingredients.
  • Added a sprinkle of red chili pepper flakes, then another one. This honestly could be oomphed more.
  • I used the green Castelvetrano olives but I don't honestly love olives even though I cook with olive oil, so I reduced the amount. You do you.
(Green) Tomato Caponata 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Prep a roasting pan by spraying or brushing it lightly with oil. Prep your canning jars.
  • Green tomatoes: 7 pounds, around 7 cups after smashing in the food processor
    • Feel free to use ripe tomatoes! If you do, reduce the sugar to 2 T.
  • Eggplant: 2 small ones, about 2 lb (1 kg) total, stemmed and quartered lengthwise
  • Sweet red peppers: 2, seeded and halved, or use 3 jars of roasted red peppers
  • Onions: 2 large, diced
  • Celery: 2-3 ribs, diced
  • Garlic: 6 cloves, minced or crushed, or 1 T. garlic paste from a tube
  • Water or balsamic vinegar: 1/4 cup for sauteeing step
  • Olives: Castelvetrano green olives or kalamata black olives, pitted and chopped, 1/2 cup up to 1-1/2 cups
  • Capers: 1/2 cup, drained
  • Salt: 1-1/2 T.
  • Black pepper: 1 T.
  • Red pepper flakes: 1/4 t., or more to taste
  • Red wine vinegar, or another vinegar 5% acidity or greater: 1 cup
  • Brown sugar: 3 T. (1 T. if using ripe tomatoes; feel free to start with less sugar of either variety and adjust to your taste)
  • White sugar:  4 T. (1 T. if using ripe tomatoes)
Oven roasting

Roast tomatoes, eggplants, and red peppers skin side up for 25-30 minutes, until skins begin to char. Remove and let cool until you can handle them without burning yourself. Remove skins. Chop tomatoes and set aside in one bowl. Chop peppers and scoop eggplants from skin (or peel skin from eggplant, whichever way you do it) and set those aside in another bowl.

Get the canning water heating and prep your jars: Depending on the size of your canning pot you may want to start it warming while the veggies are roasting. 

Once the vegetables are out of the oven, reduce heat to 200 degrees and put your jars in there on a roasting pan or cookie sheet to sterilize them.

Sauteeing

In a nonreactive pan or Dutch oven big enough to hold all the ingredients, saute the diced onions and garlic in 1/4 cup water or balsamic vinegar until onions are translucent, about 10 minutes. At about 8 minutes in, add the garlic (which can burn if you put it in too early).

Combining and cooking

Add the tomatoes and all remaining ingredients, except eggplant and peppers. Simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently (tomato can burn quickly), until slightly thickened, about 20 minutes. 

Taste and adjust seasonings; maybe you want a bit more salt or more red chili flakes. 

Stir in eggplant and peppers and cook an additional 5 minutes.

Canning

By now your big kettle of water is boiling and your jars are sterilized. Fill jars, leaving a 1/4 inch air space. Wipe rims with a damp paper towel. Dip lids in the boiling water and put them on the jars, adjusting to fingertip tight. 

Process for 35 minutes. When you take them out, set them on a towel on top of a cookie rack and wait for that satisfying ping/pop.

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 5 pints, 7 half-pints

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