Whether it is with fruits from the supermarket or those very fragrant harvested in the vegetable garden, making jam is a great way to dispose of fruit in large quantities and to make reserves to be able to find the taste of strawberries, raspberries, pear, peach or fig when the season is over. It is always a pleasure to cover your pancakes for afternoon tea, on your toast in the morning or with plain yogurt at any time of the day. However, before you can enjoy your rhubarb jam or cherry jam, you have to prepare it! And the cooking stage, although made pleasant by the sweet scent of fruit, can be tedious. While sterilizing the jars and preparing the fruit for cooking is easy enough, it gets complicated pretty quickly. To make your homemade jam a success, discover some grandmother’s tips that you absolutely must know!
Better and more easily the texture of the jam
When you are new to the art of jam, you can sometimes run into texture problems. The jam can be too thick or too runny. In the first case, you can easily save your jam by adding a little water (5 cl for 300 g of jam). However, if the jam is too liquid, it will generally be necessary to lengthen the cooking a little. You can also consideradd a few drops of lemon juice, quince, pieces of apple or apple juice to provide pectin. Thanks to a few minutes of additional cooking and this natural trick, your jelly, marmalade or jam will have more body.
Namely: the lemon will improve the preservation of the jam, and emphasizes the taste and colors of other fruits. It’s all good!
Prevent the jam from being too acidic without adding sugar
With apricot jam, strawberry jam or plum jam, there is sometimes a certain acidity. While this can be quite nice in a fruit jam, it can sometimes make the taste unpleasant if the acidity is really too strong. To avoid having to add extra sugar, you can consider adding a pinch of baking soda per liter of jam. You can also try to prepare a apple sauce enough ‘dry’ with or without sugar and add it to your jam. Then put the jam back to cook. This will sweeten the taste! The flavor of your currant jam will be perfect.
The plate test to test the cooking
Even though we follow a recipe to the letter, everything does not always go as planned. Fruit maturity (too much or not enough), dose of sugar, type of sugar, etc. There are many parameters that can influence the cooking time to achieve perfect cooking. To make sure it’s good, you can of course use a sugar thermometer: the gel point is in fact at 104-105 ° C. However, you can also simply put a little jam on a cold plate (the gelation is done cold). Tilt the plate and check if it is leaking. If it does not flow, you can stop cooking ! This trick allows you to cook jam every time.
How to have colorful jams
Do you want to know the secret of great chefs and grandmothers to have brightly colored jams? The trick to colorful jams is to immerse the jars in cold water after filling them. Thus, this creates a Thermal shock which will help the color to hold well. Even after months, your fruit will still show vivid hues!
