Author Archives: Transition Town Guildford

The workshop was great fun and Emma and Kerrin’s house smelt absolutely divine.  We made 20 jars of jam – half plum, other half nectarine and mango, and 20 jars of Emma’s summer pickle.

If you’d like to make your own jam, here’s how you do it:

Elizabeth’s great-nana’s failsafe jam

Ingredients

•  Quantity of soft fruit (plums, strawberries, apricots, peaches…)
•  Equal quantity by mass of sugar.
•  Juice of a lemon.
•  Commercial pectin (quantity by weight, one packet of Jam Setta to 1.5kg fruit)

Method

•  Wash your fruit and cut it into equal-sized pieces, removing any stones, spots or yucky bits.
•  Weigh your fruit.
•  Weigh an equal amount of sugar, mix your pectin through this and set it aside.
• At this point put your jars and lids in the oven at 100 deg to sterilise them.
•  Put fruit in a large, heavy-bottomed pot on a very low heat.
•  Let the fruit simmer very slowly until it is cooked.  This step is important, as once you add your sugar the fruit doesn’t cook any further.
•  Once the fruit is cooked, add your sugar and increase the heat to a rolling boil.
•  Boil about 10 minutes, then start to test for setting point.
•  Once your jam has reached setting point, take if off the heat.  Let jam sit for 10 minutes or so, until the fruit no longer rises to the surface.  This will ensure that when you bottle it, the chunks of fruit are evenly distributed through the jar.
•  Bottle, seal and label.
•  Stand back and feel pleased with yourself.

Notes

•  Pectin is the naturally occurring acid in fruit that aids in setting.
•  Slightly under-ripe fruit is best for jam as it tends to contain more pectin.
•  I usually guess with the amount of Jam Setta I use, depending on the type of fruit and its degree of ripeness.  It’s forgiving stuff.
•  This recipe works for just about any soft fruit – the only failure I’ve ever had with it was with custard apple, and that was because it tends to be gritty.
•  Setting point is the point at which the fruit soup changes its chemical consistency to a gel.
• To test setting point, put a saucer in the freezer. When the fruit has been boiling for 10 minutes or so, put a smear on the cold saucer, put it back in the freezer to cool down quickly, then run your finger gently through it.   When the jam creases, it’s at setting point. You might need to do this a couple of times.  If you leave it past this you end up with toffee.

Summer Pickle 

If you’d like to try the summer pickle, you can download the recipe here.