Cherry Cherry Good: Pickled Cherries and Chocolate Cherry Jam

A farmers' market run yielded 6+ pounds of red cherries of unspecified variety, appearance similar to Bing. I had a plan: One tried and true recipe, one new one. And I have the purplish fingernails to prove I executed on all that cherry pitting. Good thing my friend Stefanie has the handy kind of cherry pitter with the little box to catch the pits and the spring-action pitting rod.

The Sweet & Salty Pickled Cherries are on permanent repeat. The first year I didn't make enough to give any away. My precious, mine! The second year I added too much salt to one of two batches, then mixed up the jars, so I couldn't give any of it away because I didn't want to give away the batch that wasn't as good. Oh darn, I guess I'll have to eat all of those jars too....

This year I used the tall skinny half-pint jars so I can tell them apart at a glance, besides having the cue on every label that tells you what year I put something up.

Yield: 12 half-pints, and that isn't enough!

The Chocolate Cherry Jam, on the other hand.... It's hard for me to say the words "too much chocolate", but the amount of cocoa powder in the Ball Chocolate Cherry Jam goes some distance toward drowning out the cherries. It's delicious as a chunky chocolate sauce with fruit flavor, but next time I'd use about half the amount of cocoa powder and taste the results before committing any more. That won't affect the jelling.

[EDIT UPDATE TO CHANGE MY MIND! As my taste tester, Sweet Hubs said he could taste the cherries just fine. A couple of days later I put some of this jam on a bran muffin and was more than satisfied by the balance of chocolate and cherry. This jam is awesome. Make it.]

I started out trying to make it without pectin, ended up adding a pouch of liquid pectin when it just wasn't giving me any sheeting action after a fair amount of cooking.

Tiny tweaks:

• I added a teaspoon of vanilla early on since that enhances chocolate (but I don't think that created the over-chocolatey results).
• At a later taste test when I couldn't really get the cherry flavor I added 1/4 teaspoon of almond extract, being cautious so I wasn't making it an almond recipe, but knowing that the flavors of almonds and cherries show up in maraschino cherries and a bit of almond should enhance the cherry presence. Not by enough, though.

Yield: 3 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

Related Reading and Recipes

• 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

Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed

What is it with the wildly varying proportions in recipes for making mint jelly?!

I made apple mint jelly once before, using a recipe from a Reddit thread because I had a lot of gleaned apples that year and could make the recipe that involved cooking the apples down, extracting juice, and adding vinegar. Yes, this is extra work, but a number of mint jelly recipes call for this approach. Apple juice as medium, essentially.

Right now it isn't apple season but boy, do I have mint (as one does), so I decided to make it using some bottled apple cider I have on hand.

Various recipes call for cooking the mint leaves in water or juice, then going forward with the recipe. I don't want to use pectin so I'm going to lean on apple juice plus some added lemon juice. I remember doing this with the previous batch and getting a good jell.

The proportions thing, though.... After cutting all the mint in the yard, stripping leaves, and setting the small leaves aside to dry for mint tea, I have 2 cups. Do I start with a recipe based on one cup and scale everything up accordingly? If I do that, which one-cup recipe do I start with—the one that has a 1:1 ratio of mint to liquid or the one that has 1:4?? (That one just sounds weak-ass, if you'll pardon the term.) The National Center for Home Food Preservation does a lot of testing, particularly for whether the ratios are food safe, so I'm inclined to stick with them and ignore their use of pectin. Below my recipe I list the sources I consulted with their varying ratios, what liquid they used, and whether pectin was involved.

Ingredients

2 cups packed mint leaves, roughly chopped
3 cups apple cider (I used commercial cider because I had it on hand and it's time to use it up; this could be apple juice instead)
2 cups sugar
2 T. lemon juice
~1 T. dried mint leaves, optional

So my starting ratio is 2:3:2, plus 2 T. lemon juice.

Instructions

Read the National Center for Home Food Preservation on canning basics if this is your first time on the merry-go-round.

Sterilize your canning jars and get everything ready. 

• I put my jars on a big roasting pan in the oven at 200 degrees for at least 10 minutes. Timing this right gives you warm jars when you're ready to put hot product into them, which is important; hot jelly going into a cold jar can crack it.
• Put a small plate in the freezer to use for your jelling test.
• Get that big pot of water warming. If you're using a full-sized canning kettle it will take a while. I sometimes use my soup pot for a smaller batch, placing a metal trivet in the bottom to keep the jars from touching the heat directly. I may also speed things up by using my hot-water kettle for a faster heating of a smaller quantity and pouring that in, maybe doing this a couple of times.

Extract mint-flavored juice. Bring the chopped mint and apple juice or cider to a boil in a large pan such as a Dutch oven. You can muddle the leaves a bit with a potato masher if you like. Once the juice has come to a boil, cover and set off the heat to steep for 10 minutes or so. Strain the leaves out and toss them in the compost.

Make the jelly. Place the minty juice in a Dutch oven or other large, heavy pan. Stir in the sugar and lemon juice. On high heat, bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Cook until the liquid runs together when you lift the spoon, or test on that plate you put in the freezer to see if the liquid will wrinkle when you run the tip of a spoon through it. This will take a while because we're not using pectin in this recipe. I used a thermometer, but I find that even when I don't hit the recommended 220 degrees if I've gotten over 205 my products will set up.

Optional mint intensification. Taste the liquid early on (carefully! It's very hot!). If you'd like the flavor to be a bit more minty (mintier?), place the dried mint leaves in a teaball and put that in the liquid to steep while it's coming to the jelling stage. I did that for this batch and my official taste tester said it's the perfect mintiness, meaning it's very minty.

Canning step. Pour the hot jelly into hot, sterile jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a dampened clean paper towel; put the lids on. Process 10 minutes in boiling water, timing it from when the water returns to the boil after putting the jars in.

Yield: 5 quarter-pints that jelled beautifully with zero pectin. Picture below only shows four because one has already been used up by Chief Taste Taster, aka my Sweet Hubs.

What I don't do that you may find in other recipes. 

• I don't add a drop or two of green food coloring because I like the natural golden color. That commercial mint jelly looks like Jell-O to me. If the bright green is important to you, by all means go for it.
• I don't save some fresh mint leaves to chop fine and stir in at the end as the jelly goes into the jars. Some people like little things floating in their jelly. I don't.
• I also skip skimming the foam in some recipes. I stir it down and mix it in. If it really looked foamy all across the top of the pan I might skim it. When I do, I put the foam in a little jar to go in the fridge because it's perfectly good! In peak canning season I might end up with a jar of mixed flavors from three or four different recipes and it can be delicious, a sort of bumbleberry jam by proxy.

Mint Jelly Recipes

List below has the recipes I consulted and the proportions, along with whether or not they add any lemon juice or vinegar (another element that varies widely) and whether they use pectin.

Ratios listed are in cups for mint:water:sugar, with a note if the recipe calls for apple juice instead of water. I'm listing them in order by the volume of mint leaves and liquid. If the recipe calls for apple juice then it shouldn't need as much sugar for sweetness, although it needs it for jelling action.

• Mint Jelly #2, NCHFP: 1:1:3.5; 1/2 c. vinegar; uses pectin
• Mint Apple Jelly, Andrea's Recipes: 1:4:4.25; uses pectin
• Mint Jelly #1, NCHFP: 1-1/2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 2 T. lemon juice; uses liquid pectin
• Ball Canning (via Reddit; not on their site now): 1-1/2-2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 4 T. lemon juice; uses pectin
• Mint Jelly, Canning Diva: 1-1/2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 2 T. lemon juice; uses liquid pectin
• Classic Mint Jelly, Serious Eats: 2:2:2; 1 c. vinegar; uses pectin, specifically Pomona's so you also need to have calcium water on hand and I do not
• Mint Jelly Recipe Without Pectin, Learning and Yearning: 2:2:3; 1/4 c. lemon juice
• Apple-Mint Jelly with Fresh Mint, Brown Thumb Mama: 2:3-1/4 apple juice:3.5; 1/2 t. lemon juice; uses pectin
• Unknown source from that Reddit thread: 1-1/2:4-5 c. (apple juice produced from apples, plus 2 c. white vinegar):3-1/2 c. (helpful ratio here: 7/8 c. for each cup of juice)

Related Reading and Recipes

• 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
• "Sweet Harvest" 
• 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
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

Mixed Citrus Ginger Marmalade Take 2

Keeping a bag in the freezer labeled "Future Marmalade" ensures that citrus doesn't go to waste in my household. The mixture grows in its own good time, at a pace determined by meetings that offer mandarin oranges, Arnold Palmers and other beverages that come with a slice of lemon, an orange slice decorating a dinner eaten out somewhere. It grows in its own eclectic direction based on what I'm cooking, or think I'll be cooking; this year's mix included 2 limes, a couple of lemons I know I bought for a recipe I didn't get around to making, and a blood orange I don't quite remember acquiring, along with the usual oranges and miscellaneous slices.

This year I used a different technique, following Food in Jars' technique of boiling the fruit and then letting it cool rather than macerating overnight, then slicing the peel into tiny ribbons. I also took her 1:1:1 fruit:sugar:water to heart. When the water you use is the water you boiled the fruit in, it's retaining all the citrusy goodness.

Ingredients

~4 lbs. citrus peel and flesh (I neglected to measure volume; I'd guess this was somewhere around 6 cups)
6 cups of the water the fruit boiled in
3-1/2 lbs. granulated white sugar (this was chosen based on coming close to matching the citrus by weight and not exceeding it; the last batch was a bit too sweet)
2-1/2 ounces crystallized ginger, chopped
2 T. ginger paste from a tube (feel free to grate and chop if that's your thing, and you can leave this out if you don't want much gingery goodness)

Instructions

Honestly, read Food in Jars for good instructions, or the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This is my abbreviated description of what I did and the options I considered. 

Prep the fruit: Your choice on handling the fruit. You can boil it all together in plenty of water for an hour, then let it cool. If you do this, you then slice the zest into tiny ribbons, save the seeds and pith in cheesecloth so they can go for a swim in the cookpot to provide pectin, and chop the flesh. 

Or you do the zesting/cutting/etc. beforehand and soak the prepared fruit overnight in the water. You still have to boil it at that point so I don't know that you're really far ahead; it's more a question of whether you remembered to set things up the night before the day when you'll have time to cook and can the marmalade.

If you really want to spread the labor out, do the zesting and separate the pith and flesh as you acquire citrus, keeping the zest, flesh, and stray juice in one bag, the pith and seeds in another, both in your freezer. Defrost all, put the seeds and pith in cheesecloth that will soak in the cooking peel/flesh combo, then proceed with boiling for an hour to soften before adding the rest of the ingredients.

Prep jars and water bath: I sterilize my jars by putting them on a pan in the oven at 250 degrees for 10 minutes or more. At about the halfway mark of cooking the marmalade you'll want to get that going. You want the jars to be warm or hot when you put the hot marmalade in them to avoid a big temperature differential. 

I've also made use of the hot water bath, dipping one jar at a time in with the canning tongs, but that's slow. I mostly do this when I end up with a bit more product than I'd anticipated and need a couple of additional jars.

Or you can run them in the dishwasher, in which case you started that well before this point because you read the whole recipe before starting to make it, right?

Boil the marmalade: Bring all ingredients to a rapid boil in a heavy pan such as a Dutch oven with plenty of surface area. Stir frequently and keep it boiling.

At about 25 minutes start testing the temperature. You're aiming for 220 degrees. I didn't quite get there with my 2024 batch and it jelled just fine. Do a bit of a taste test here for the balance of bitter, sweet, and gingery. You may decide you want it a bit sweeter or hotter.  Add sugar or more ginger accordingly and cook a bit longer. Toward the end, pull the cheesecloth bundle of pith and seeds out and squeeze it carefully; tongs come in handy here. That pectin-producing fruit stuff is now ready for the compost pile.

Put in jars and process: Set your jars up on a towel or baking rack. Ladle the hot marmalade into each jar, leaving about a quarter-inch (halfway up the threaded portion of the jar). Wipe the edges of each jar with a damp cloth so there's no product to interrupt the seal, put on the lids so they're firm but not screwed super tight. Process in the boiling water for 15 minutes, starting your timer after the water returns to boiling once all the jars are in.

Yield: From the quantities listed above I got 12 quarter-pints and 7 half-pints.

My small-batch trick: I have a really big canning kettle. Holds a bunch of water, deep enough to process quart jars, has the nice rack for lowering the jars in. And it takes forever to heat to boiling even if I speed it up by using my hot water kettle to quickly boil 4 cups at a time and dumping that in. 

If I'm not going to spend the whole day making multiple things to can, I use my soup kettle instead. I put a metal trivet in the bottom so the jars won't sit directly on the kettle. I have to handle each jar going in and coming out individually with the jar lifter. That takes a bit of time and care, but I figure I'm saving energy by not heating more water than I really need for quarter-pints and half-pints.

Related Reading and Recipes

• 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
• "Sweet Harvest" 
• 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
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

Canstravaganza 2025

Food in Jars blogger Marisa was holding a canning challenge that started in January. I happened across it after I'd already inadvertently completed the February assignments: frozen fruit and freezer excavation. I love that she includes a community-building item in each month. She also notes that this is all in fun and we should feel free to mix things up. I can say that I did at least one of the two challenges for each month at some point during the year, just not necessarily in the month she listed them.

January

• Food in Jars challenge: Root vegetables and brassicas. I didn't check this box. I've made banh mi mix in the past (shredded daikon and carrot in vinegar) and it lasts forever in the fridge so I'll come back to this at some point. Community-building assignment: Share a jar. Definitely did that; I took jars to meetings and gave them to friends. That happens just about every month, actually.

February

• Tayberry Jam Recipe by Chef Heidi Fink. 11 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints
• Classic Raspberry Jam Recipe by Creative Canning. 7 quarter-pints, 7 half-pints
• Blackberry Roasted Plum Preserves by Southern Fatty. 8 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints
• Blackberry Plum Fruit Leather: No recipe needed. Pureed blackberries and plums in the food processor, dropped in dollops about the size of a Nilla wafer on the dehydrator trays, and dried overnight to produce little fruity coins by the next morning. Those went into the freezer.
• The Food in Jars challenge was using frozen fruit, the community challenge was freezer excavation. For me, that came up when the freezer defrosted later this year. But I did make all of this month's jams from berries and fruits I'd harvested last year and stored in the freezer.

March

Working with green tomatoes frozen in 2024, 12 pounds of tomatillos frozen in 2023, I made:

• Tomatillo Lime Jalapeño Jam: 8 half-pints, 12 quarter-pints. I added 3 jalapeños to the recipe, wanting it to have a bit of heat because that felt like a fit.
• Green Tomato/Tomatillo Chutney: 12 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints. I linked to the recipe although I think in future I'll use my own Green Tomato Chutney recipe whether I'm using green tomatoes on their own or mixed with tomatillos. I can attest that the spicing mix in that is really, really good.
• Food in Jars challenge: Make a mix. I didn't make a mix in the sense of a muffin mix or salad, but I did mix green tomatoes and tomatillos. Community challenge, contribute to a community fridge or pantry. I think we did drop something off at the food shelves by the community garden on Yew, and I gave away some herbs when I had more than I could use later in the year.

April

• No canning, but the Food in Jars community challenge was to plant something and I did that. The canning challenge was herbs and alliums. I collect and dry herbs when the pots cry out for harvesting, so that happens when it happens.

May

• No canning. Food in Jars challenge was berries. Mine are still growing at this point. The community challenge was to learn from a friend. I swap canning recipes with my friend Stefanie' we have different pickled cherry recipes and I like mine.

June

• Sweet & Salty Pickled Cherries,: 26 half-pints (I'm not messing around this year. It took a great deal of discipline to stretch last year's cherries to this spring!)
• Food in Jars challenge: Jam. I cover that in other months. The community challenge was to attend a potluck. Our neighborhood potluck is in August and I went to that.

July

• Tayberry Rhubarb Jam: 9 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints
• Food in Jars challenge: Pickles, and I made those pickled cherries in June. Community challenge, support a local farmer or grower. I do that with regular trips to the Olympia Farmers' Market, and I buy eggs from the "farmette" stand down the street.

August

• Apple Cardamom Rosemary Jam: 4 quarter-pints, 4 half-pints. Read my notes on seasoning adjustments in my piece on making lots of use of apples
• Froze 8 pounds of sliced apples for future apple-pear butter; the apples are ready ahead of pears this year
• Food in Jars challenge: Sauces, which I'd thought I would make this year. I ended up doing this in November when I experimented with ketchup (never again!) and ended up making a chutney sauce. The community challenge was to gather or glean, and this time of year I'm picking blackberries. I also get apples as they ripen from a couple of publicly located trees.

September

• Last September was a canning frenzy. This September wasn't. I went on a two-week vacation starting Sept. 27 and needed to get things done to be ready for that.
• Food in Jars challenge: Condiments, and host a swap. I did the ketchup effort in November. A canning swap sounds like a fun idea; maybe I'll organize that one of these years.

October

• Also not a canning month, but the "October Surprise" of a defrosted freezer guaranteed I'd be canning in November.
• Food in Jars challenge: Drying and dehydration. I did that back in February with fruit leather, and over the course of the summer I harvested and dried some of the herbs I grow. Community challenge, share your knowledge. I write blog posts to capture and share my recipe explorations so check, did that.

November

• Blackberry Jelly: 15 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints.
• Tayberry Jam: The tried and true Chef Heidi Fink recipe I used last year. 
• Sour Cherry Amaretto Jam: I used the no-pectin sour cherry jam recipe from Sourdough Brandon, enhanced by the amaretto suggestion in the recipe from DishNTheKitchen.
• "Razzbuzzy Jam": 7 quarter-pints. Followed the Classic Raspberry Jam and stirred in 3 T. of raspberry liqueur. Not very buzzy, but tasty!
• Spiced Blueberry Jam: 7 quarter-pints.
• Smoky Spicy Tomato Jam: 3  half-pints, 11 quarter-pints. This Food in Jars is on repeat from last year and it's my go-to.
• Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce: 8 half-pints, 11 quarter-pints.
• Salted Caramel Pear Butter: 2 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints
• Cranberry Orange Jam with Crystallized Ginger: 3 half-pints, 13 quarter-pints
• Read my comments on the Serious Eats site. Allow for more cook time to get softened citrus and cranberries. Try reducing the sugar a bit. You don't need pectin.
• This is also the point in the year when I start thinking I should have put up more half-pints, ordered more quarter-pint jars, or both! I like the quarter-pint size for gifts.
• Spiced Apple Butter: 4 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints, 1 6-oz jar, an experiment in reusing a commercial jar and lid that went into the refrigerator because I wasn't confident about the seal.
• Food in Jars challenge: Apples. Yep, got that covered. Community challenge, barter with a friend or neighbor. I do a lot in our Buy Nothing group, both giving and receiving. That space doesn't permit bartering but it feels as if it's in the general spirit.

December

• Food in Jars challenge: Use it up! Is she kidding? I make far too much to use it up in a year! Community challenge, bake for others. Yep, did that.

Not the blowout year that 2024 was, but then I still have jars of product from that year on the shelves. Anyone want some jam? Chutney? Green tomato sauce? Anyone? And I did actually end up hitting the mark on the Food in Jars challenge, just in different months.

Spiced Apple Butter Recipe

Admittedly not the biggest tweaks I've ever made to a recipe, but here it is. In this year's food preservation I found myself going back to last year's canning posts for recipes and links and I'll keep this running tally going.

I had rounded up quite a few apple butter recipes when I invented my Chai Apple Butter Recipe last year. I wanted one that used apple cider vinegar for the extra tang; some recipes don't include that, or don't use much. For this batch I started with The Pioneer Woman's apple butter recipe. 

Since I was simultaneously working on two other recipes I used the slow-cooker method that Food in Jars uses for her Salted Caramel Pear Butter (made a batch of that two days ago). My slow cooker has a steam vent hole in the lid. For the first stage of cooking in this recipe I block that with a chopstick to keep the moisture in and cook the flavor into the flesh of the apples. That comes out for the later stage when I need the liquid to cook off.

The Pioneer Woman calls for adding a cup of water. I substituted apple cider. Why not make it even more appley when you have the chance?

Earlier this year I processed a lot of gleaned apples with my corer/slicer and had both skin-on and peeled in the freezer. For this recipe I used the ones with the skins, for the extra pectin and flavor. This saves the peeled ones for a future apple pie or other dessert use. Go with what you have and what you prefer. You can run the cooked mash through a food mill if you started with unpeeled apples and don't want the extra fiber.

Of course, per the title here, I oomphed up the spice. She called for 1 teaspoon of apple pie spice or pumpkin pie spice for three pounds of apples. I drew some inspiration from British Mixed Spice, discovered along the way in my never-again-will-I-make-ketchup research. I wanted it to be cinnamon-forward. This might sound like a lot of seasonings but it didn't taste overly spiced with that dusty quality I've created at times with over-enthusiastic perusal of the spice drawer.

I needed to deal with the aftermath of the Great Freezer Defrost of 2025, so my quantities are larger than my starting-point recipe: 4 pounds of apples. More than this quantity of pears had worked just fine in the slow cooker. You can scale this back to the quantities in The Pioneer Woman's recipe.

Ingredients

4 lbs. apples, cored and chopped. These can be frozen or canned, skins on or off according to your preference

1 c. apple cider vinegar

1-1/2 c. apple cider or apple juice

3/4 t. salt

1-2/3 c. brown sugar

2 t. vanilla paste or vanilla extract, if you have it on hand

2 t. flaky sea salt or kosher salt

1 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. black pepper

1/4 t. nutmeg

1/4 t. mace (optional; for me this is the essence of pumpkin pie spice)

1/4 t. cardamom

1/8 t. cloves

Directions

Place apples, vinegar, cider/juice and salt in slow cooker and stir to combine. Turn it to high. Cook for 60-90 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the fruit to be soft enough to be blendable.

Blend with an immersion stick blender if you have one. Or remove a couple of cups at a time, blend in a blender or food processor, then return all the blended sauce to the slow cooker. Be careful when blending hot semi-liquid foods. Don't fill the container at or above the halfway mark, keep a towel over the top, adjust the lid so you're letting steam escape rather than build up. All of this is why I prefer my immersion blender.

Mix the dried spices together, then add the brown sugar, vanilla and spices to the pot. Prop the lid slightly ajar so steam can escape, maybe with your spatula or a chopstick laid crosswise so the lid can rest on it on one end. 

Cook on high, stirring often, until it's the color and consistency you want. If you want to be thick and spreadable this will take a while, 2-3 hours. If you stop much sooner, congratulations! You have made a spiced applesauce. 

Stirring often means every 15 minutes or so. Food in Jars says to stir every 30 minutes but if I waited that long I'd have apple butter stuck on the bottom of the pot. You can let it go a bit longer early on when the pot has plenty of liquid in it. The more it cooks down and thickens, the more you need to be sure to scrape the bottom thoroughly. 

How hot your slow cooker gets will be a factor only you can judge, and that will affect your stirring frequency and total cook time. Food in Jars blogger Marisa notes that the older Crock-Pot had a gentler low temperature than newer ones. That's my experience with my newer model; I really can't go off and leave it.

Prep your jars for canning according to the safe canning practices from the National Center on Home Food Preservation. Process 15 minutes at full boil.

My yield: 4 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints, 1 6-oz. jar in a reuse experiment from a commercial product (nice straight-sidded jar)

Canning posts usually show something like this as the triumphant closing shot, or maybe a close-up of the delectable contents. 

In reality the closing scene is more like this. 

I should have taken a picture even earlier I was making full use of every flat surface in the kitchen and had three recipes going at once. Maybe next time.

Related reading and recipes

• 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
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce

I may have noted recently that I don't think green tomato ketchup is worth the effort.

Also noted: Large quantity (~6 pounds) of green tomatoes plus chopped onions plus canned apples, all prepped and in the fridge under the assumption that I'd be making another ketchup recipe.

Third note to file: Lots of green tomato chutney and green tomato/tomatillo chutney already on hand in all their chunky goodness from last year and earlier this year.

Hence the thought experiment: What if I followed a chutney recipe but then blended it to make it smooth like ketchup? I should have some pretty screamin' awesome sweet/tangy sauce that would be great with fries, tofu, on oven-baked yams, maybe over rice, with cheese on crackers if it wasn't too runny to sit there, blend with yogurt to make an interesting dip. Many possible uses! Although not a ketchup! (And yes, blended green chutney sauce looks quite a lot like split pea soup.)

I give quantities as if you had diced or chopped things. I heartily endorse throwing ingredients for this into the food processor and whirling them up to save time. You're going to be pureeing and smooshing to get the lumps out anyway.

This makes a big batch! I'd already committed myself with the earlier prep. This could be cut in half with proportionate adjustments to everything. Cook time will vary depending on how juicy your tomatoes are.

Inspirations

• Green Tomato Ketchup recipe by From the Larder
• My own Green Tomato Apple Chutney Recipe, developed last year
• Creative Canning Green Tomato Ketchup, which was the winner of the two recipes I tried last weekend

Wet ingredients

• Green tomatoes: ~6-8 cups, yield from ~6 pounds
• Yellow or white onion: 1-1/2 cups, diced
• Apple: 2 cups, diced, canned, or even applesauce if that's what you have
• Green bell pepper (or another sweet bell pepper color if that's what you have): 1 whole pepper, diced
• Dried fruit: 1 cup of whatever turns your cranks. I like a combination of dates and dried cranberries
• Vinegar: 1 cup. Malt or apple cider vinegar preferred; white vinegar will be sharper; red or white wine vinegar is fine. Just needs to be labeled 5% acidity.
• Brown sugar: 1-1/2 cups. OK to substitute white sugar if that's what you have
• Green or red chilis, optional: 1-2, diced, if you want to add some fresh chili heat. Substitute 1-2 t. crushed red pepper, tasting and adjusting for your heat preference as the recipe cooks down
• 1 T. fresh grated ginger, or ginger paste from a tube (so handy!)
• 4-5 garlic cloves, crushed, or 1 T. garlic paste from a tube
• Optional: 1-1/2 T. vegan Worcestershire sauce, if available. Regular is fine if you don't have vegan, but then you should label this for any gift recipients who might prefer vegan
• Optional if you want a thinner sauce: 1/2 c. sherry, cooking sherry, or something you routinely substitute for these (apple cider or apple juice could work here)

Dry ingredients/Seasonings
Stir the dry spices together in a small bowl, then add to the wet ingredients. Yes, yes, you can absolutely dump the measurements straight into the sauce without mixing them first, but combining them first gives you a better distribution in the liquid than if you end up with a surprise clump of ground ginger.

• 1 T. fennel seeds, whirled in a coffee grinder or pounded with a mortar and pestle
• 1 T. ground mustard
• 1 T. salt
• 2 t. ground cardamom
• 2 t. ground black pepper
• 1 t. smoked paprika
• 1 t. cinnamon
• 1 t. ground cardamom
• 1 t. ground ginger (or increase fresh ginger above)
• 1/8 t. nutmeg
• 1/8 t. cloves

Put all ingredients except for the optional sherry or apple juice in one big stockpot (takes longer) or divide across two pans, preferably wide saucepans or Dutch ovens with plenty of surface for evaporation of the liquids.

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a rapid simmer/low boil, and cook, stirring often, for around 60-90 minutes. Tomatoes spit when they boil so wear mitts, pay attention. Don't cover the pans; the goal here is some evaporation. Frequent stirring is essential to prevent some of the sauce burning to the bottom of the pan. Ask me how I know.

At 60-90 minutes the vegetables may not be entirely soft yet. Taste the seasonings and oomph up flavor notes you'd like to have a bit more of. Go carefully here, maybe 1/4 t. or 1/2 t. at a time if it's something that could end up overpowering.

Continue to cook until everything is soft enough to blend. I tried my immersion blender first, then went to the regular blender. Be careful blending hot liquids. Put in less than half the container's capacity, have the lid cracked open a tiny bit to let steam out, start on a low pulse and step it up as the contents puree and liquify.

Return to the kettle and cook a bit longer to reach the consistency you want. This is ready to can now, though. 

If it's thicker than you want and you'd like a more pourable sauce, add 1/2 cup of sherry (idea borrowed from the Creative Canning recipe linked above), apple juice or apple cider, and cook another 5 minutes or so.

Follow safe canning practices from the National Center on Home Food Preservation. Process 15 minutes at full boil.

Yield will vary depending on how juicy your tomatoes are. My yield: 8 half-pints, 11 quarter-pints.

Related reading and recipes

• 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
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup

I knew this. I knew this. I'd made a batch of homemade tomato ketchup years and years ago in Spokane and learned just how very, very long it takes to cook down. (Why specify "tomato" ketchup? Because, as I learned from The Joy of Cooking, whether you call it ketchup or catsup it's any savory smooth vegetable sauce. Mushroom Ketchup? It's a thing.)

But oops, I did it again. Had a lot of green tomatoes and remembered last year's idea of making green tomato ketchup. I'd even rounded up the recipes. And I still have plenty of my beloved green tomato chutney on hand, supplemented by some green tomato/tomatillo chutney that's a bit sharper, but still good. 

Last year I tried making the dehydrated seasoned green tomatoes linked in that same post. Blech. And we'd been saying we'd like to have ketchup on hand without ever actually getting around to buying any. I can fix this!

Sunday I headed out to the yard to pick the many, many green tomatoes left and do a bit of cleanup of the raised beds. Since I started my seed snail 'speriment a bit late, the Mortgage Lifter heirloom tomatoes hadn't had enough time to ripen. They're huge and beautiful and I'll be starting those seeds earlier in 2026 so I get the payoff in ripe red tomatoes.

So, yeah, around 24 pounds or so of green tomatoes.

Brilliant idea: Make batches of three different recipes in a head to head taste contest, then use the last batch of tomatoes to double down on the winner.

Dear Reader, this is not how I'll ever spend another Sunday.

I got through two of the three recipes. Neither of them makes my heart beat faster. One was the winner with Sweet Hubs. Fortunately, that was the batch that had more tomatoes based on the recipe's proportions. I added more sugar to both recipes. Neither of them is a giftable product, which is my yardstick for success.

And the labor! So many steps. So many. The two recipes used two different approaches, too.

Mamta's Kitchen Green Tomato Ketchup: Cook the tomatoes, onions and garlic until soft, which didn't take nearly as long as the four-hour Creative Canning recipe. Put through a food mill, then through a sieve to get the smooth sauce consistency, then cook with spices, vinegar and sugar. This batch had a smaller quantity of tomatoes. I doubled it to 2 kg and was able to fit into my deep saucepan. I normally wouldn't double an untried recipe but I had so, so many green tomatoes and the spice mix sounded really good. Garam masala, mustard, and more.

The recipe indicated that 1 kg of tomatoes would produce around 2 liters of sauce before adding spices etc. My tomatoes must have been super juicy, as I started with 2 kg and ended up with not quite that 2-liter mark. I seasoned based on volume produced, not volume I started with. I added more spices after tasting; mine are getting old, I know.

Yield from all of that: 2 half-pints, 1 quarter-pint.

Creative Canning Green Tomato Ketchup: Cook everything everywhere all at once for a long, long time (four hours), stirring frequently so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan. This started with 6 pounds of tomatoes so I used my Dutch oven. I'd already done the food mill + sieve steps for the Mamta recipe. This one called for pureeing ingredients in a blender, then putting it through a sieve. Much easier than the (manual) food mill process. I'd started with more tomatoes so it isn't a completely parallel comparison but I know I threw a lot more tomato skins/seeds/solids into the compost with Mamta's recipe than with this one.

This one was sweetened with honey. I added another cup of sugar after tasting (one-half cup at a time). It came out the flavor winner and was a much brighter green color.

Yield: 6 half-pints.

If I were making either of these again, which I will not be doing, I'd use the blender + sieve technique from Creative Canning. I might use the cooking approach from Mamta's because it was so much faster, but then again that might be a function of the tomato quantity. 

I couldn't tell you whether having the seasonings in from the beginning can be credited with the better flavor of the Creative Canning approach. I'd actually think it would be the opposite because seasonings added too early can disappear a bit. Mamta's recipe made the point that sugar and salt both darken the end result, hence adding them in at the end, but the spice profile with several brown spices and blends meant hers was the darker brown sauce anyway.

Another lesson learned: I had purchased cute little 8-ounce stout bottles from Fillmore Container, planning to bottle whatever sauces I might make this year as a change of pace from chutney. But the ketchup was thick enough that it wouldn't pour easily out of the bottle and I realized it would be far easier to can it in my standard jars. I'll use those bottles for something runnier. 

In a side note, I couldn't find instructions for headspace with that smaller mouth, which worries me. Need enough air to suck out for the vacuum, not something that creates so much pressure the bottle gives way in the kettle. The functional headspace with a much smaller circumference is obviously less so I think I need to do the geometry calculation to figure out how much headspace yields the equivalent air volume of a 1/4" headspace on a regular mouth jar. I'll keep poking around to find that or do the math before I try making some other sauce.

I did the prep for the third batch while the others were cooking down. I'd always known it would have to wait, given the amount of time it takes ketchup to cook down. So I whirled the tomatoes and onions in the food processor and stuck them in the fridge.

Know what I'm going to make with them instead of the third ketchup recipe?

Chutney.

Related reading and recipes

• Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce
• 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
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

When Life Hands You a Defrosted Freezer, Make Jam

I spent much of last September in a canning frenzy. This September wasn't. I went on a two-week vacation starting Sept. 27 and needed to get things done to be ready for heading out of the country to England.

October? Also not a canning month. That two-week vacation went into mid-October, then we had a family weekend trip (which involved giving away jars of tasty treats), then I had a business trip.

Oct. 31, however, brought me a nasty surprise that meant November would start with a lot of canning. Went out to the freezer and discovered the door was open a tiny, tiny bit. Just wide enough for long enough to have defrosted every last thing, including all that produce I'd prepped and frozen earlier in the year. My visions of cozy winter weekends making a batch of this and a batch of that when the mood struck turned into a salvage situation with the clock ticking.

I made some fast decisions about how much I could get through in a weekend and put those thawed bags into the refrigerator. I figured since the apples and pears were mostly destined for apple-pear butter they could stand the freeze/thaw/freeze cycle a bit better than berries and tomatoes, so they stayed in the freezer to go back into their cold slumbers.

Saturday production:

Blackberry Jelly 15 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints. This no-pectin recipe jelled like a dream. I usually make jams but I had two big bags of blackberries and I still have seedless blackberry jam from last year, or was it the year before? The pulp and seeds will go into fruit leather with some plums a neighbor gave me.

Tayberry Jam: 16 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints. Pruning those bushes really paid off in production! The tried and true Chef Heidi Fink recipe I used last year. My experience has been that it takes much longer to get to the jammy stage than her recipe suggests. I use two tests: Does it run together in a sheeting action when I dip some up in a spoon, and does it hold together and slide down a plate from the freezer without a lot of juice separating out when I tilt the plate? I picked the latter tip up from a recipe somewhere and really like it, as it doesn't involve burning my finger in the jam.

Sour Cherry Amaretto Jam: 5 quarter-pints, 2 half-pints. The cherries are courtesy of a Buy Nothing you-pick offer. I didn't get a lot, around 3.25 pounds. I used the no-pectin sour cherry jam recipe from Sourdough Brandon, enhanced by the amaretto suggestion in the recipe from DishNTheKitchen. Honestly, a tiny bit disappointed on this one. The sour tasted more of the lemon juice than the cherries to my tastebuds.

"Razzbuzzy" Jam: 7 quarter-pints. Going with the "let's add liqueur to jam" theme, I made the Classic Raspberry Jam recipe from Creative Canning. I only had about 2.5 cups of raspberries. I used a 1:1 fruit:sugar ratio per the recipe and added 3 T. raspberry liqueuer. Not all the alcohol cooks out, or so I've read, but this isn't really enough for a buzz. It's just a fun word.

Spiced Blueberry Jam: 7 quarter-pints. Another tiny batch. I had just about 1.5 pounds, perfect for one of the Food in Jars small-batch recipes.

I'll cover Sunday production and beyond in another post. 

Related reading and recipes

• In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup
• 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
• All my posts on food, gardening, and the environment

My Circular Economy of Apples

Every apple recipe I made last year—and that's a long list—started out with fresh apples to which I applied some labor. Peel, yes or no depending on the recipe. Core, yes or no depending on the recipe. Slice, dice, or shred. Cook with spices. Discard something.

Bear in mind that my parents grew up during the Depression and raised me to be thrifty. I minimize my food waste as much as possible. What there is of it goes into the garden beds in the central composting square. I use the keyhole gardening technique, AKA dump food scraps into a space in the middle of the raised bed, let Mother Nature and Father Time do their thing. (My raised beds are rectangular, built by my Sweet Hubs from a kit, rather than the round shape most often illustrated. Compost happens either way.)

But why compost before you've gotten every last possible bit of use? Although there's such a thing as taking it a bit too far. I present my lessons learned for your entertainment and possible benefit.

A typical two-day cycle starts with the apples I glean from various roadside trees and pick up when a neighbor leaves a bag by the curb. (So really, it's a three-day cycle. Day one, collect apples.)

First, I use my handy-dandy apple corer without peeling and prep 8 lbs. of sliced apples to freeze for later use in apple-pear butter, or possibly this Apple Caramel Sauce from Food in Jars, which sounds scrumptious (recipe can be made using other fruits too!).

Put all the cores in a bag. Plenty of apple-ness left there that can be rendered into juice.

Use the apple corer with the peeler setting to slice another 4 pounds of apples, then dice those up to macerate overnight with sugar for Apple Cardamom Rosewater Jam. Throw the peels in the bag with the core; they carry pectin that will help the juice jell.

Simmer those cores and peels until soft with some ginger in preparation for Apple Ginger Jelly. I made this one last year and it's going on annual repeat. Set that up to drain overnight.

The next morning, discover that the apple juice is maybe a trifle bland. I really should have gotten fresh gingerroot, not just used the ginger paste from a tube that I had in the fridge. Okay, I can fix this, I still have pounds and pounds of apples. Quarter a bunch of the smaller ones and throw into the strained juice so it will reduce and pick up more appley goodness. Add more ginger paste. (Really should have biked to the store.) 

Update on Apple Ginger Jelly: Sweet Hubs ended up running to the store and getting gingerroot. Sliced that up (the recipe calls for 3 oz. to go with 2 lbs. apples, and I had 3 lbs.) and simmered it in with the apples. Makes all the difference!

In the meantime, use my food mill to smoosh the cores and peels and squeeze out every bit of apple pulp I can. I figured I'd throw that into the future apple-pear butter, but hey, that looks a lot like applesauce! Granted, these apples have already given up some (most) of their flavor. Here comes the Maple Applesauce recipe from Food in Jars to the rescue, with its cinnamon sticks and maple for some extra flavor oomph.

But wait, those apples I added to the juice are also going to be nice and soft. Slow my roll on the applesauce plan until I can get those smooshed up too. Ideally they would drain for 6-8 hours per the recipe, but y'know, it's okay if some of the juice goes into the applesauce.

After tasting the apple mush, though, I decide it really has lost almost all its flavor. Even the addition of the apples that had more flesh and a tablespoon of lemon juice didn't really fix it.

At that point I have a few options: Blend up some blackberries with the bland applesauce and make fruit leather. Freeze this stuff in a muffin tin, which makes handy half-cup quantities, and save it to bake into future muffins and breads, recognizing they'll need more spice. Bake a batch of muffins or bread right now, for that matter. Or head into a fresh batch of applesauce with whole apples that I can mix this into and resist the urge to restart this whole circular economy again.

I do have an entire bike pannier full of apples still to process.... 

Clearly Indian Apple Chutney lies ahead. I made that last year and it tasted fantastic with some Cougar Gold aged white cheddar on a cracker. But not today. Chutney takes a while to cook and I have apple mush to deal with. That muffin tin of apple mush for the freezer sounds like the easiest way to go. I just have to label it with honesty: "Bland Applesauce 2025".

Recipes in this post

• Apple Caramel Sauce
• Apple Cardamom Rosewater Jam: Flavor notes to read before you make this! 
• She says to cook 40 minutes minimum, longer for deeper color. I probably cooked twice as long to get it to a consistency that looked like jam and yet still had some apple bits. Cook for the texture you want in your jam.
• She calls for 5 cardamom pods. I used 8 pods and it was so subtle I couldn't taste it, but my pods were a bit old. Ended up adding something like 3/4 t. ground cardamom. Definitely a taste and adjust seasoning.
• She calls for 1 T. rosewater or "a splash". I appreciate subtle rosewater, but too much and it will taste like hand lotion for me. I started with 1/2 t., stirred in, let it cook a minute, tasted. Did this until I was at 1-1/2 t. rosewater, so half what she called for. Most definitely a taste and adjust seasoning.
• Apple Ginger Jelly: I didn't have fresh ginger root on hand (gasp!) so I used the ginger paste in a tube I find so, so handy. That really didn't cut it and I had to do make some amendments (add more apples and cook down more juice with gingerroot). Get fresh gingerroot.
• Maple Applesauce
• Indian Apple Chutney

Related reading

• 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
• Peach Elderberry Chutney: A Farmers’ Market Experiment

Making Taybarb: Tayberry Rhubarb Jam Recipe

In last year's "canstravaganza" I made strawberry rhubarb jam, courtesy of the abundance in my garden, along with raspberry jam and tayberry jam. I pruned the tayberry and raspberry bushes for the first time this winter and they rewarded me with an explosion of berries this summer. Since I could see that coming, I ate the strawberries fresh as I picked each day's batch and stashed rhubarb and the berries for a combination to be decided later.

Tayberries have a wonderful floral sweetness that really comes out when they're cooked. I thought that would balance the rhubarb well. I did a bit of exploring for sample recipes involving tayberries and rhubarb and couldn't find one with that exact combination. Time to develop my own, with my usual research on fruit:sugar ratios and other elements. Since tayberries are a cross between blackberries and raspberries I started with recipes for blackberries, then looked at other berry/rhubarb and tayberry/something combinations, bearing in mind that rhubarb is tart and other berries vary in sweetness. Food in Jars, my go-to, commented that a 1:1 ratio could work fine in a strawberry rhubarb recipe.

I hoped to avoid using pectin so the jam wouldn't end up too solid and jelled. I've overshot before on this and I want spreadable jam, not rubberized fruit you can stand a spoon in. I've also had trouble reaching the jelling temperature at times and have added a bit of pectin late in the process with success. According to one recipe I read blackberries have more pectin than their red cousins. Tayberries are purple when they're ripe so I'm treating them like blackberries.

My sources:

• Low-Sugar Blackberry Rhubarb Jam with low-sugar pectin, Food in Jars. Blackberries:rhubarb 1.5:1 by weight. Fruit:sugar not provided in consistent measurements; 2.5 pounds fruit:1.5 cups sugar.
• Blueberry Rhubarb Jam with pectin, Food in Jars: Blueberries:rhubarb:sugar 1:1:1 by weight.
• Tayberry Lemon Jam, no pectin, Anchored Baking: Tayberries:sugar 2:1. 
• This one is worth reading for its great photo series illustrating the various stages of jam testing with a chilled plate. It takes a different approach than the usual "run your finger through, look for the wrinkle" technique. Instead you put the jam on the plate, chill it in the freezer for four minutes, and observe what it does when you tilt the plate up. If the jam stays as a blob and slides down the plate without a bunch of juice separating out, it's jam.
• Tayberry Jam, Little Berry Blog, no pectin: 2.25 lbs. tayberries:2.5 c. sugar
• Tayberry Jam, Chef Heidi Fink, no pectin: 5 c. tayberries:3.5-4 c. sugar
• Tayberry Raspberry Refrigerator Jam (no pectin), Jam Blog: Ratio of raspberries to tayberries was strictly a function of how many they were able to pick. Berry:sugar ratio 2:1 by weight
• Strawberry Rhubarb Jam with pectin, Food in Jars: Berry:rhubarb ratio 2:1. Fruit:sugar ratio also 2:1. Measurements by volume, not by weight.
• From a mention of vanilla in this Food in Jars post and the next one listed I'm taking away the idea to include a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste for every 6 c. total fruit.
• Sweet Cherry Rhubarb Jam with pectin, Food in Jars. Cherries:rhubarb 3:2 by weight. Fruit:sugar 5 lbs:3 cups, or an estimated volume comparison of 14:3 cups.
• Small Batch Vanilla Rhubarb Jam with pectin, Food in Jars: 1.25 lbs. rhubarb:1 c. sugar
• Rhubarb Hibiscus Jam, with pectin, Food in Jars. 2.25 lbs:2 c. sugar

With all this in mind(ish), I settled on 1.5:1 tayberries:rhubarb as a good ratio for the fruit, and 2:1 fruit:sugar as a starting point for the sugar. The jam is really delicious although the rhubarb tartness doesn't show up the way I thought it would. Tayberries are pretty powerful; next time I'd make it a 1:1 ratio, maybe even 1:1.5.

I have a lot of tayberries on hand. Even after making this I'll be doing something else with them. Hence the large quantities here, which I split across two pots. Many jam recipes tell you not to double the recipe in one pot because it will take so much longer to cook down. They're right, it does, and I've cooked various too-large quantities of chutneys and jams and paid the price in time. 

Feel free to reduce these quantities! This is geared around how much rhubarb I had on hand.

Several of the recipes call for lemon, often expressed as the juice and zest of one lemon. I don't always have fresh lemons on hand; I'm using 3 T. bottled lemon juice to stand in for a single fresh lemon zest + juice. This gives a boost to the pectin levels without adding commercial pectin, which I prefer not to use.

Tayberry Rhubarb (Taybarb) Jam

Prep 

• Macerate the fruit overnight if you want to. (Notes* at end of recipe)
• Get your hot-water bath canning setup together. This blog isn't your home for full canning safety information. Consult the National Center for Home Food Preservation for detailed instructions.
• Put a small plate in the freezer to get cold for the wrinkle test you'll use to check jam readiness for canning.

Ingredients

• Rhubarb: 2.6 lbs, a hair over 8 cups, diced fine
• Tayberries*: 3.75 lbs., 12 cups. Fresh or frozen both work. Other berry varieties also good here!
• Sugar: 7.5-10 cups (taste and adjust based on berry sweetness; if you picked your tayberries when they were red, not dark purple, they weren't fully ripe and will be more tart)
• Lemon juice: 1/2 c. (1/4 c. per 10 cups of fruit)
• Vanilla bean paste (optional): 2-3 t.

Yield: 8 half-pints, 9 quarter-pints

Cooking instructions

Gently mix the rhubarb, berries, sugar, and vanilla bean paste if you're using that together. 

Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring regularly. Turn down to medium heat.

Add the lemon juice (or juice/zest if you're using that).

Cook, stirring regularly, until the fruit softens, reduces, and breaks down to a jammy consistency. Be sure to stir clear to the bottom. I use a rubber scraper to be sure I'm getting everything up, especially as it starts to thicken and stick more. 

Depending on whether you start with fresh or frozen fruit this could take 20 minutes or so up to 30-45. If it spits at you, which hot fruit can do, reduce the heat slightly. The rhubarb should more or less dissolve and the liquid thicken.

As the fruit softens use a potato masher or the back of a wooden spoon or rubber scraper to break up bigger chunks. If you want a smooth jam, you might very carefully use an immersion blender. I'd protect myself with a lid or towel covering the pot if I went this route to avoid getting splattered with boiling jam. I didn't do this and my jam was a nice spreadable consistency.

Continue cooking until it reaches 220 degrees or passes the freezer plate test. I can generally get my jam a bit north of 200 and then find it's jammy enough to pass the freezer test and sets up just fine, not rubberized.

Ladle into clean, sterilized canning jars, wipe the rims with a clean damp paper towel or cloth, put on the lids to fingertip tight. Put in the canning kettle, bring to a full boil, and process for 10 minutes.

About the foam

For the prettiest jam, recipes tell you to gently skim off the foam that forms on top. I chase it to the edge, trying not to pick up any bits of fruit, and put it into a small jar that then gives me foamy jelly—delicious! Not something I'd give as a gift but I pop it into the fridge and enjoy it. I've also completely skipped this step and stirred the foam into the jam as it cooks. It does end up rising to the top when I put the cooked jam into the jars. You could skim at that step too, I suppose, to preserve your culinary esthetics reputation. This time around I did a decent job of skimming; image below is a "before".

Note on jars and lids

One of my most satisfying discoveries last year was the Fillmore one-piece canning lids with the buttons. They seal with a very satisfying pop within minutes of coming out of the hot-water bath, sometimes within seconds. These make my jars look nicer as a gift item, since the recipient gets a very reusable jar/lid combo. This, of course, means it's possible fewer of my jars make their way back to me. I figure the canning-jar economy is a pay-it-forward setup and don't worry about it.

I discovered these thanks to a Food in Jars post on canning with one-piece lids. I have lots of rings left and I'm using those on non-jam products like pickles, applesauce, and salsa that I can in pint or quart jars. The Superb brand lids Fillmore also sells are very high quality and also have a solid pop.

I also really like the Fillmore square-shouldered half-pint jars and their smooth-sided quarter-pint jars, all made in the US. The quilted ones by other jar manufacturers are pretty but I have a hard time getting the dissolvable Avery labels I use to stick if the size goes beyond the little smooth oval onto the quilted surface.

*Optional added steps

You can do one or the other of these but not both, since you wouldn't want to lose sugar in the process of squishing berries through a sieve. I didn't do either and it turned out fine.

Maceration: Mix the sugar into the tayberries (and rhubarb too, if you want) and let them sit for several hours or overnight. This will release the juices. Don't discard the juice! You want that tasty liquid to cook into the jam as it cooks down. The maceration step speeds up the cooking time a bit.

Seedless option: Another step I skipped that you could add if it's your preference: Gently cook the tayberries alone for a bit to loosen them up, then squish them through a fine sieve with the back of a soup ladle to remove the majority of the seeds. Tayberries are a blackberry cross and their parent's seediness does show up in the jam.

Why the sieve and spoon method: I've tried a food mill; I don't have plates fine enough to get the seeds out. I've tried a KitchenAid seed removal attachment. Himalayan blackberry seeds backed up and eventually blew the attachment right off the front of the mixer. I'm just lucky I wasn't standing in front of it at the time. It blew with a sound like a rocket going off and likely could have taken an eye out, or at least done some serious damage.

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