Making your own jam is another one of those activities which instills the ‘homemade’, back to basics apporaoch which reminds me why i started all this in the first place. Sort of like making fresh bread and brewing your own beer or cider, it takes you back to the raw ingredeints making food how it should be made. It makes me think of people hundereds of years ago stewing fruit down and producing all manner of things with fruits and veg i havent even come across yet.

Being a quiet foodie, tho, im starting at the beginning with a basic, homemade, raspberry jam. Im choosing the umble but tasty raspberry because when I moved into my new house, I put a raaspberry cane in at the end of the garden with hopes but no expectations of something happening. No attention, no food, no water or maintenance of any kind and two years later I have enough raspberries to make jam…its that simple. Who knows…?

I did read that you can make jam out of almost anything, so that it what I intend to do!

Now as an amateur jam maker it seems to me you need 3 things to make jam. You first need your fruit or vegetable you are going to cook down. Secondly, you need your sugar and finally, your pectin. The trick to making good jam however is to get a good balance of all of these and keep as much freshness as you can. The longer you cook your fruit, the more freshness you are going to loose, however you need to cook your fruit down to not have it be a watery jam.

I have chosen to use the jam sugar you can get in the shops with added pectin. The purist in me would suggest that down the line, as I continue to make jam, I will use other fruits as that source of pectin but unitl I know how to do that…im starting simple.

I will also note here that I dont think you need as much fruit as you would think to make a batch of jam. As long as you use a similar fruit to sugar ratio you will have made something which looks and tastes delicious.

My recipe has 3 ingredients…

• 500g raspberries
• 500g sugar (with pectin)
• Juice of one large lemon

Method…

• Firstly place a plate in the freezer and sterilize the jars you intend to use…
• Take half your raspberries and place them in a pan with the lemon juice and cook on medium high for about 5 minutes. You want to push this mixture through a fine mesh colander. Throw the seeds away.
• Place the raspberry and lemon mixture back into the pan with the rest of the raspberries and the sugar.
• Cook on a medium high heat for 8 minutes.
• After the 8 minutes take your plate out of the freezer and test the consistency of your jam. It needs to ripple when you push at it. If it doesn’t, cook it for another 2 minutes and continue the process.

Serve with croissants or other pastries, on top of porridge, spread on some good sordough toast…see where it takes you…