I took a jar of the jam I made in the spring along with my new favorite crackers to the book club last week and the jam was a hit. I kept looking at the tree outside with large pink grapefruits dangling in with the medium green developing ones and knew I needed to make more grapefruit jam.
I wanted more than 3 little half pints this time, so I doubled the number of fruits I picked. You can't do that with pectin jam because you need a precise amount of pectin/fruit/acid/sugar/heat, but since this kind of jam is nothing more than fruit/sugar/heat, I knew I could double it.
Now here was the problem I ran into: I couldn't get the jam to come up to a temperature higher than boiling. Not gonna gel that way. I thought about it and realized I probably needed more sugar. I tasted the runny jam and it was sweet, but not "jam sweet," so I added a cup of sugar to the five I had already put in. The temperature came up a couple of degrees. I added just 1/2 a cup more and it came all the way up to 220F (104.4C).
At that point I ladeled it into jars, cleaned out the pot, filled it with water and jars and processed them for 10 minutes in boiling water.
Here is a comparison. The first one is yesterday's jam. You can see it is much lighter and softer. The one on the right is the Spring '12 version and was cooked more to get it to set up and thus is much darker, but also has a more spreadable consistency. In additon, the fruit was not as sweet in the spring and the dark jam has a nice tartness to it. Yesterday's jam is sweet from the sugar of course, but doesn't have any tartness because the grapefruits are really sweet this time of year.
I enjoyed comparing the two batches. Dh and I decided we prefer the new jam, but both are good.
I ended up with:
2 pints
4 half-pints
Yum.
No comments:
Post a Comment