No Half Measures

28 Dec 2019

Part 1: in which I make some lovely jar-shaped raspberry candy

This is my first time making jam, as you can probably guess from the title. Here’s how it started: in May of 2016, about three years ago, I excitedly dug up part of my front yard to plant perennials and my childhood dream: two raspberry bushes. Winter of 2018 I’m loathe to cut them back because I’m afraid of limiting my eventual raspberry haul, and my bushes certainly do not disappoint: fast forward to July 2019 and I’m overrun.

We’re supposed to leave for a family reunion for 5 days, and my enormous red raspberry is heavy with berries. We frantically pick berries for several hours in the hot sun the day before we’re supposed to leave, and tell all our neighbors to come pick them while we’re gone. All in all I end up freezing five gallon bags of raspberries for something in the future.

Now it’s December, and I’m wondering, what do you do with five gallons of frozen raspberries? My first thought is jam. However, it’s currently raining ice (thanks, Minnesota winter) and I don’t have any pectin, so I try to find a recipe that will work. It calls for 4 cups of raspberries and 4 cups of sugar. Sounds easy enough. You gently warm the sugar in a glass dish in the oven at a low temperature to facilitate melting, and then you start cooking down the raspberries, add the sugar, and boil until (and I quote, because here’s where the struggle started):

3. Add warm sugar, return to a boil, and boil until mixture will form a gel (see tips, below), about 5 minutes.

Here’s the tip:

• To determine when the mixture will form a gel, use the spoon test: Dip a cool metal spoon into the hot fruit. Immediately lift it out and away from the steam and turn it horizontally. At the beginning of the cooking process, the liquid will drip off in light, syrupy drops. Try again a minute or two later — the drops will be heavier. The jam is done when the drops are very thick and two run together before falling off the spoon.

That seems pretty clear, so off I go! The raspberries cook down nicely, the sugar is warmed and added, and I’m stirring away. I pull spoon after spoon out of the drawer and try to “test” it, not really knowing exactly what I’m looking for. There is a point where the jam ungracefully “glops” off the spoon in large batches (remember this bit for later), but I don’t really see “two [drops] run together before falling off” so I keep cooking. Eventually the jam on the spoon is far too hot to lick off after testing - which I’d been doing, of course. It’s at this point that I knew I was in trouble.

I hadn’t yet sterilized my jars in my makeshift hot-water canning setup, so I transferred the jam to a big measuring cup. It was stiff and difficult to scrape out with a rubber spatula, so I resorted to a wooden spoon. This is red flag /#2. While the jars are sterilizing for five minutes, I try to stir the jam and realize that it’s solidifying against the edges of the measuring cup, which should’ve been red flag /#3, but I decided to heat the measuring cup in hot water to loosen it enough to put it into the jars, which are now done.

I struggle to fill three half-pint jars with the tar-like jam, and am honestly worried at this point. The last bit goes into a fourth jar, and the other three go into the hot-water bath for canning. The fourth partial jar is alarmingly solid.

This is where I know. That last jar starts cooling, and the resulting substance is hard enough to tap a spoon into and only leave a dent. The three full jars are still boiling, but I know this isn’t how jam is supposed to feel.

After some frantic Googling, yes, I’ve overcooked my jam. Several things could have gone smoother: I should have watched some videos about how to tell whether your jam is done. I probably should’ve used a thermometer. I definitely need to figure out what to do now.

After some helpful internet friends discuss this very same problem (for those of you struggling like me, this has helpful solutions for what to do now and here is some general jam knowledge that I found helpful, plus some classic Serious Eats humor) I decide to add some boiling water, microwave my raspberry candy and stir. It basically can’t get worse. Some other good suggestions are to get it out somehow, flatten it and dip it in chocolate, which also sounds appealing.

Part 2: in which I save the day and then actually make jam (probably) The boiling water trick works! Or at least enough to get the hardened jam, which is not quite crunchy but definitely not soft, out of the jar and into a measuring cup. I stir in more boiling water and break up the chunks and if it doesn’t make jam, at least it’ll make raspberry sauce.

However, I still want to have actual jam to enjoy from my piles of raspberries. After watching several videos on how to interpret the different ways that jam “runs off the spoon”, and learning that jam typically gels around 220°F, I start over.

With the vague idea that maybe my raspberries contain a lot of pectin, I’m using a different recipe (sorry, scientific method. Not today.) that calls for nine cups of raspberries and six cups of sugar. Although this recipe doesn’t call for it, I warm the sugar in the oven again because I really don’t have a good track record of following recipes as written.

This time I’m using my infrared thermometer to keep a close eye on the progress of the jam. I know that there was a point in the first batch where the jam sort of fell off in several clumps, and that’s what I’m looking for again. Despite having several more gallons of raspberries I’m still determined to not let this batch go the same way as the first - failing in a different way is at least interesting. As suggested by Serious Eats, I stick many spoons and a small plate in the freezer for testing.

When the proto-jam reaches about 212°F I start feeling worried and grab a spoon out of the drawer to see how it runs off. It doesn’t seem quite thick enough so we go a bit longer, to 218°F and then I pull it off. This time, I’ve had the jars in the boiling water the whole time the jam was cooking so that I can just pull them out and fill them without a delay. I feel pretty slick about that.

As I write the jam is cooling, and most of them have popped. The spoons and plate are still in the freezer because I didn’t dare stop stirring to get them (oh well).

The jam turned out slightly stiffer than I would have preferred, but it’s spreadable! As soon as they were cool I popped open a jar and tried it on some fruit bread. It’s good!