Greetings, Fellow Gem Miners and Jam Minders!
I couldn't help myself but post this Jam session in this community. I was wondering at first if this was still a gardening thing. Processing the stuff of trees until it could fit the stuff of sand and hearth.
In my previous post I wrote about the amounts of cherries that came from the lower branches of an adult tree...in a flash. A relative flash. Coming faster than our ability to even gather them on time, let alone process them or...well...eat them.
Future plans related, I thought it was time I learned or at least tried a few preservation techniques.
The kind of successful one was adding tons of sugar and turning the cherries into jam, then putting them into jars. Or...a jar.
When is a door not a door? When it's ajar.
— A character of Stephen King, from The Dark Tower...and probably kids in the hood.
You need 1 village yard, 1 cherry tree, 1 monkey...
All right, I'll try to keep to the basics.
So, here's the recipe I used:
1 kilo of Cherries.
0.500 to 0.600 k of Sugar
0.005 k — 5 grams — 1 tea spoon of lemon acid (powder)
(Then, if yours are not chemically treated during the last few seasons, you should also cut the cherries in half and remove any worms that might live inside. Little white maggot thingies. I used the point of a knife to pick them up and also cut off any rotten piece of the inside of the cherry. That slows down the process quite a bit but I did have about 20 % of my cherries infested since I picked them late — the last days before they go to waste.)
Only then you weigh your cherries. You need 1 kilo of that clean mass.
You put them in the utensil along with the sugar covering them. It will draw the juice out in about an hour or so. More if in pre-cooled state.
After they seem to be swimming in their own liquid and the sugar is no longer visible in white heaps, you start boiling them.
In order to keep them in cherry shape and still preserve their red color, you boil them in short periods a few times. Three or four.
You wait for them to start boiling, you add the lemon acid in the middle of that first five-minute boiling stage, you wait for a couple of minutes more and you take your future jam off the heater.
You wait for it all to cool down.
You boil them again — 5 more minutes of boiling. You stir them from time to time. You take them off again.
You wait for it all to cool down.
You boil them at least three times, but I did boil them four times.
I had no butter so I had my foam remain with me to the jar and beyond.
Ah, yes,
you poor the jam in jars while it's still boiling hot. And you try not to scald yourself. You also try to top your jars — as little air remaining under the lid as possible.
You hope.
You eat.
Jam and Peace!
Wishing you good luck,
Manol
