Preserves Online: Cherry Preserves

Thursday, 19 July 2012

Cherry Preserves

Humbug. I've been making jam for over 30 years. I use pectin - usually Certo, because it's the brand most widely available here. The advantage to using pectin, in my opinion, is that you can make jam with a much shorter cooking time, which produces a product that tastes fresher. It also gives you a higher yield for the amount of fruit because you're not boiling all the liquid away until it reaches the gelling point. The results are also predictible and generally foolproof. It WILL gel most of the time.

On the other hand, there is some charm to the long-cooked traditional jam flavour that a pectin-based jam doesn't have. I think that the fruit almost caramelizes and there's a rich undertone to a jam made that way. However, some fruits just don't have sufficient natural pectin to gel properly - and so you either have to boil the heck out of it or be satisfied with a compote-y textured jam. Plus, if I knew that a batch of jam could take me all day to make, I'd never bother to do it.

As for keeping qualities - make the jam according to the pectin package directions and process the jars properly and it will keep for years. So your mother the jam junkie is wrong there. I have - and still use - jars of jam that I made 2 or 3 years ago that are absolutely totally fine.