My first-ever attempt at making blueberry jam was a true disaster, the product of an overly anxious jam newbie obsessed with getting a “gel”. I was so busy running back and forth between my refrigerator and the jam pot checking for thickening, you see, that I utterly failed to notice I’d cooked my jam for […]
READ ONThe great fear that all aspiring jam makers bring to the stovetop is: how will I know when I have a “gel”? Which is to say, how does one know when the point of maximum thickness has been reached? All sorts of home-spun methods have been devised to ascertain the doneness of jam. There’s the […]
READ ONOther than sweetness, the thing that truly defines jam is its texture. In a perfect universe, that texture is thick yet still slightly soupy, “gel”-like but still very spoonable. Just like grandma used to make. Oh yes, I know that many of the most current recipes encourage cooks to employ packaged pectin until their jam […]
READ ONThe Battle of Vienna, a conflict I have often referred to as the most baking-intensive conflict in the history of man, was begun this day in 1683.
READ ONAs adapted from Recipes from Home. It goes like this: 2 quarts (about 2.5 pounds) blueberries 1 teaspoon powdered pectin (optional) 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice 4 1/2 cups (2 pounds) sugar Makes six 8-ounce jars.
READ ONJam is simply a cooked mixture of fruit and sugar. It is distinct from what we in America call jelly, since jelly is a thickened mixture of sugar and fruit juice only. Most jams start out as a roughly 50-50 mixture of sugar and fruit by weight. By the time they’re cooked, however, that proportion […]
READ ONAs I mentioned yesterday, the primary purpose of jam — other than being a spread of almost unspeakable pleasure — is to preserve fruit. For sugar, as I have oft written, is as lethal to microbes as salt…albeit in a slightly different way. Salt kills microbes by osmosis, literally extracting water from them through their […]
READ ONWe’re smack in the middle of the berry season here in the Midwest, which means — at least in the Pastry household — the boiling water canner is being put through its annual paces. It’s the glory and the curse of a temperate, continental climate that its fruiting flora produce more delicious edibles than its […]
READ ONHere’s one key observation I’ve made after months of fiddling with my new brick oven: these things get really, really hot inside. So hot in fact that a cheerful round of bread dough can be transformed into lump of smoking, blistered ash in as little as eight minutes. But what else to do but risk […]
READ ON…in my brain, caused the accidental deletion of a slew of unopened emails. So, if you sent me an email over the last ten days or so and didn’t get a reply, please resend.
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