Christmas Jam Recipe - Food.com (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to making jam? ›

The Magic of Macerating

One of my favorite tricks for jam-making is macerating the fruit first. Macerating is the process of coating the fruit in sugar and letting it rest for a few hours or overnight, which pulls some of the juice out of the fruit and creates a syrup with the sugar.

Tip the cranberries, orange zest and juice, the star anise, cinnamon stick, cloves and sugar into a heavy-based saucepan. Bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30-35 mins, stirring often until the cranberries have burst and the liquid has reduced – it should be thick and jammy.

The biggest difference between freezer jam and canned jam is in taste. Both are jams and are great on sandwiches, rolls, biscuits and the like, but freezer jam is never cooked, thus making it taste fresh just like a perfectly ripe strawberry.

Coarse-grain white granulated sugar is best for jam-making as it ensures a good clear jam, but fine caster sugar can also be used. The coarse grains dissolve more slowly and evenly, giving a better result. Granulated sugar with added pectin is also available, but it shouldn't be necessary to use this.

Adding acid in the form of fresh lemon or lime juice is important for two reasons: First, it makes for a more well-balanced jam, returning some of the acidity lost with the addition of sugar. Second, pectin needs acid to properly activate, or firm up.

Usually that thin, white film is jelled foam. If your fruit was foamy in the sauce pan and you didn't skim the foam off, or if your mixture had a lot of air in it and you didn't do air releasing before putting the jam in the jars, the foam or tiny air bubbles rise to the top of the jar and form that white film.

Add dried spice to your jam when you're adding the sugar, which will infuse the flavor into the jam. Wait to add anything from the wet spices category until you've removed the jam from the heat; that way it doesn't boil off.

When you make jam at home, you are likely doing some or all of these things: You source very high quality fruit. Typically jammers have extra fruit from their own garden that they are preserving for later in the year.

Jam and jelly have virtually the same nutritional value, fruity taste, and spreadable texture. Thus, you can use them interchangeably. That said, some studies have analyzed the nutritional profile of jams after 9 months in storage and observed no significant losses in their antioxidant content.

Is it better to use fresh or frozen fruit for jam? ›

The jam I make from frozen fruit is almost as good as from fresh, and certainly tastes better than jam left around for a year.

While you can purchase special plastic containers made for storing jam in the freezer, it's not necessary. You can use whatever sealable plastic containers you have hiding in your cupboards, or you can use good, old-fashioned Mason jars.

I water bath in sterile glass jars with metal ring seals. Sugar is the original preservative,going clear back to when... The only preservative you need for homemade jam is sugar and heat. In high enough concentrations, sugar is a preservative.

Cornflour (or cornstarch) combined with lemon juice is a great alternative to pectin. It thickens up jam really well, combined with the sugar and heat. Also, this recipe is gluten free! There's so many way to use this homemade strawberry jam, it probably won't last you more than a month.

You don't have to, but proceed carefully. "If you are really anti-pectin, you can omit it, but you'll need to cook the jam longer. Doing so will remove most of the water content in order to get it to set up properly and in turn, will result in a smaller yield," adds Wynne.

5. Do Not Stir Once Mixture Is Boiling. Once your jam/marmalade it has reached a rapid rolling boil do not stir it. Stirring it will alter the temperature of the jam/marmalade meaning it will take longer to reach the setting point.

Add pectin.

Whisk a tablespoon of powdered pectin (preferably the no-sugar-needed variety) into the pot of cooking jam. Test for thickness and add another tablespoon if needed. Learn More About Pectin: What's the Deal with Pectin?

By adding pectin near the beginning of the cooking process, the fruit mixture will thicken to the ideal consistently nearly immediately, allowing you to fill many more jars of jam than you would without pectin.