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:

• Singapore Red Chili Sauce, Food in Jars
• Sweet Pepper Jam Recipe: Can't make this, don't have kiwis on hand or another fruit I want to use this way.
• Fermented Hot Sauce: I want to do this today, not after a week or more of fermentation time, although I could plan ahead and do this later in the season as the peppers really come on. The madhatter peppers I'm growing this year are so cute!
• Cranberry-Jalapeño Jelly: Definitely making this one later in the year when cranberries are in season.
• Sweet Chili Pepper Relish
• Hot Chili Pepper Relish: Made this a couple of years ago and we still have a jar or two on hand.

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

Related Reading and Recipes

• Green Tomato Caponata Recipe
• Cherry Cherry Good: Pickled Cherries and Chocolate Cherry Jam
• Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed
• Mixed Citrus Ginger Marmalade Take 2
• Spiced Apple Butter Recipe 
• Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce
• In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup 
• When Life Hands You a Defrosted Freezer, Make Jam
• My Circular Economy of Apples 
• Making Taybarb: Tayberry Rhubarb Jam Recipe
• Canstravaganza! Food Preservation 2024
• Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe 
• Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes.
• Apples, Apples, Apples!
• Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini)
• Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!
• Pears, Pears, Pears! 
• Future Marmalade 
• Vegan Cranberry Caramelized Red Onion Orange Chutney Recipe Experimentation 
• "Sweet Harvest" 
• All my posts about food, gardening, and the environment

Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe

Invasive so-called Himalayan blackberries clamber over much of western Washington's terrain. Dubbed "Himalayan" by Luther Burbank as a marketing move even though they probably originated in Armenia, these blackberries aren't the thornless variety he had hoped to breed by a long shot. Not even close; when I pick them along the roads near my house I wear long sleeves, some hiking pants with a smooth finish, and a glove on one hand to push the vines back.

Like my gleaned apples, they're free for the taking so I end up thinking up things to do with them. 

• Fruit leather: I have a batch waiting in the freezer for me to decide whether I'm turning them into fruit leather along with plums I got from a Buy Nothing offer.
• Flavored vinegar: I soaked a big batch in white wine vinegar to make this for gift-giving. I used a sugar-free blackberry vinegar recipe, although other recipes involving sugar would be fine if you'd like to start with a sweeter base. I didn't take the longer-term route of extracting and then fermenting blackberry juice to turn it into vinegar. I hung onto the soaked blackberries and used a bunch of them in the chutney, which provided vinegary quality. Now pink, with much of their color along with flavor transferred into the vinegar, a few of them wait in the freezer for a future something or other.
• Blackberry chutney: If you've read my other recipe roundups about tomatoes, apples, pears, zucchini, and green tomatoes, you know I love me some chutney! So of course I had to riff on a few recipes I found. This turned out not to be as tangy as most of my other chutneys, more along the lines of a complex jam than anything. Well worth putting on a cracker with some cheese though

Blackberry Chutney Recipes

Where I started for inspiration, considering proportions of ingredients, whether or not it included apples (most did and that seemed like a good medium to carry the blackberry flavor), and the spices used:

• BBC Apple, Blackberry and Cinnamon Chutney
• Larder Love's Easy Blackberry (Bramble) Chutney
• Wellington Bakehouse Blackberry Relish: No apples
• Feast Glorious Feast Blackberry Chutney
• Foraged Farmacy Spiced Blackberry Chutney

I had a lot of blackberries even accounting for the ones waiting for fruit leather so this recipe uses large quantities. All the reference recipes use about a third of the quantities here. I scaled up and checked the spicing levels along the way.

Blackberry Apple Chutney

• Blackberries: 1,300 grams (mine were soaked in vinegar; refer to note with the vinegar amount)
• Apples: ~415 grams, approximately 3-4 apples depending on size, diced small
• Onion (red or yellow): 400 grams, diced small
• Brown sugar (white okay; brown sugar gives a caramel element): 450 grams
• Apple cider or any other vinegar with 5% acidity: At a guesstimate, 350 grams; taste and adjust after it's all cooked together. I used blackberries soaked in vinegar so the vinegar amount is based on proportions from the source recipes
• Garlic: 3 cloves, diced or crushed
• Ground cumin: 1/2 t.
• Crushed red pepper: 1/2 t.
• Fine salt: 1 t.
• Cinnamon: 1 t.
• Cloves: 1/4 t.
• Optional: Zest of 1-2 oranges

Yield: 4 half-pints and 8 quarter-pints

Prepare jars for canning following best practices such as those on the National Center for Home Food Preservation or Food in Jars.

Dice the onions and start them cooking at a gentle heat. After five minutes add the apples, blackberries, and spices and cook until the fruit is soft. Depending on the apples this will run around 15-20 minutes. Add the vinegar and sugar. Stir the sugar in and allow it to dissolve. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring often. At about 10 minutes taste and adjust sweet/sour balance by adding a bit more vinegar or sugar to your taste. Cook until you can drag a wooden spoon through the base of the chutney and leave a clear trail in the pan before the thickening liquid fills the line back in. 

Ladle into sterilized jars and process in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. For best flavors, wait at least two weeks for the chutney to mature before using.

A Year of Poems: September

The back-to-school month, the month that bridges from summer to fall, Warm days, still, but shorter. The slant of light changes, softens. The day may be hot but the night cools the earth. September is here, and the hillsides still abound with fruit on the blackberry bushes I picked in August.

To compile these monthly collections I read a lot of poems I don't link on the page. A poet may mention September as the date of an event but the poem itself doesn't evoke this time of year. Or it's so archaic I just can't get into it. The ones I link speak to me in some way that may or may not be reflected in the specific lines I excerpt here.

My process includes some research as needed. I recently heard someone hesitate as they started to use the term "Indian summer" to refer to the second summer we sometimes get after a frost in fall. I felt the same hesitation, not knowing if that term (like so many in English) embeds a painful history. 

This phrase appears in poems about September and I wanted to know if it gives offense. The words of poetry reflect the understanding and eras of their authors and a poem may have beauty worth savoring, but I stumble on terms that reflect the bias of those times.

Adam Sweeting, the author of a book on the cultural history of the term "Indian summer", tells us yes, it's offensive. In fact, in 2020 the American Meteorological Society issued the recommendation that we refer to "second summer". Sweeting also notes that the idea of a frost followed by a second summer is less likely, given climate change. We're more apt to experience an extended hot period without the cooling temperatures, then plunge abruptly into winter.

I'll indicate below when a poem uses the term.

[Updated to add this] Another term I learned from Island Martha on Mastodon: "Old Women's Summer" is used in Estonia. I couldn't find the background searching so I asked her if it was considered insulting. She said, "Old Estonian women getting a 2nd chance to sit in the sun with their neighbours AND getting credit for it. What do YOU think?" I think it sounds delightful.

"September Meditation" by Burton D. Carley

Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer:
"What can you tell me about September?"

"And Now It's September," by Barbara Crooker

The ornamental grasses have gone to seed, haloed
in the last light. Nights grow chilly, but the days
are still warm; I wear the sun like a shawl on my neck
and arms.

"To the Light of September" by W.S. Merwin

and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings

"I haven't met anyone who hasn't offered me her humanity" by Gary Margolis

To see a storm

of maple leaves as the tides they are.
The apples, at home, their own kind
of burnishing, rented pear.

"Porch Swing in September" by Ted Kooser

and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it's time that the swinging were done with,

"September Tomatoes" by Karina Borowitz

It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.

"Green Pear Tree in September" by Freya Manfred

He planted it twelve years ago,
when he was seventy-three,
so that in September
he could stroll down 
with the sound of the crickets
rising and falling around him,

"September Sunday" by Lucille Broderson

I've done what I can,
picked berries in season,
cut back canes, snapped beans,
scrubbed down the mud-spattered walls.

"September, 1918" by Amy Lowell

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

"September Water" by Elizabeth Bohm (click the arrow at page right to get the rest of the poem after what begins on this page link)

In the quiet sunlight of September
The harbor's top is blond and burnished stone,
Any swimmer who cuts that width of stillness
Is scorched with cold to the marrow of the bone.

"September 2" by Wendell Berry

up the birds rose into the sky against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.

"The Imprint of September Second" by Ethan Gilsdorf

Second of September, I ate the last berry of summer,
the sun still dreaming it's July twenty-first,

the blackberry bush stiffened by heat, losing suppleness,
the berry hard as corn, the seed living in wisdom

teeth that afternoon, me glancing at the scene
glancing back at me, red leaves against a hard green grass, 

"Blackberry Eating" by Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,

"If a Babylonian astronomical diary in cuneiform on a clay tablet records the observation of Halley's Comet on 22–28 September of 164 BCE, then" by H.L. Hix

why not say cluster of leaves still clinging
to the tip of one branch (the others bare
that bloomed crimson last week) slowly turning
red to brown, 

"September Midnight" by Sara Teasdale (uses the term "Indian summer")

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

A Year of Poems

• A Year of Poems: January
• A Year of Poems: February
• A Year of Poems: March 
• A Year of Poems: April
• A Year of Poems: May
• A Year of Poems: June
• A Year of Poems: July
• A Year of Poems: August

A Year of Poems: August

August is the season of ripeness where I live. I'll be picking blackberries this month, free for the taking all over western Washington where they're non-native and invasive as all get-out. But they're worth the trouble to mash through a sieve and turn into seedless blackberry jam. Or mix with other berries to make bumbleberry jam. Maybe I turn them into fruit leather. I may make some berry-flavored vinegar while I'm at it. Or wait, I found this page with several recipes including a blackberry apple chutney that sounds really tasty and I do love chutney....

I'll be thinking of Mary Oliver as I pick.

"August" by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, 

"Ordinary Time" by Jay Parini

I shift through woods, sifting
the air for August cadences
and walk beyond the boundaries I’ve kept

for months

"You Can't Have It All" by Barbara Ras

and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so.

"Cherry Tomatoes" by Anne Higgins

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.

"August Morning" by Albert Garcia

Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.

"Under a Sturgeon Moon" by Mike Orlock

The month has the feel of compromise
and yield, as we mark time in a steady march
to the inevitable surrender of fall.
But that moon!

"August Moonrise" by Sara Teasdale

The maples stamped against the west
Were black and stately and full of rest,
And the hazy orange moon grew up
And slowly changed to yellow gold
While the hills were darkened, fold on fold
To a deeper blue than a flower could hold.

"California Hills in August" by Dana Gioia

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

"Late August" by Mary Chivers

Even on the most tranquil
late August afternoon when heavy heads
of phlox bow in the garden
and the hummingbird sits still for a moment
on a branch of an apple tree—
even on such a day,
evening approaches sooner
than yesterday,

A Year of Poems

• A Year of Poems: January
• A Year of Poems: February
• A Year of Poems: March 
• A Year of Poems: April
• A Year of Poems: May
• A Year of Poems: June
• A Year of Poems: July