Want to learn the art of jam? Professional pastry chef and canner trainer Camilla Wynne offers five tips for making the perfect jam.
Posted at 4:00 p.m.
1. Equipment
You don’t need very specialized equipment to make jams at home. Among the essentials: new Mason jars and lids, a baking sheet, a silicone spatula (or a wooden spoon), a digital thermometer, and most importantly, a thick-bottomed cauldron, wider than it is tall, which facilitates evaporation. If you want to invest, Camilla Wynne suggests buying a Mauviel-type copper jam pan.
PHOTO FROM THE MAUVIEL WEBSITE
2. Fruit
For maximum flavor and freshness, local, seasonal and ideally organic fruits are used. No time to cook ? You can freeze your fruit without any problem. Do not hesitate to mix small fruits with a high pectin content (blackcurrants, currants) with those that contain less (strawberries, blueberries, cherries). The riper a fruit is, the less pectin it contains. It is therefore not ideal to make your jams with very ripe fruit. Camilla suggests a ratio of 75% perfectly ripe fruit and 25% not quite ripe fruit.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, ARCHIVES LA PRESSE
3. Sugar and acidity
The more sugar a jam contains, the longer it will keep. Sugar also helps gelling. But with current preservation methods, it is not necessary to use, as in the recipes of yesteryear, an equal amount of sugar and fruit for the jam to keep well. Camilla Wynne uses 50% to 60% sugar, in proportion to the amount of fruit, and her jams keep for about a year. As for the maceration in lemon juice, it activates the pectin naturally present in the berries.
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4. Potting
To avoid having to sterilize the jars in boiling water, the secret is to pour the still very hot liquid (90°C or more) into the jars, seal them, then turn them upside down 1 or 2 minutes (which sterilizes the lids) before letting them sit untouched for 24 hours. This is what Camilla Wynne calls the “inversion” method. Please note: this method only works for hot liquids such as jams, jellies and marmalades.
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5. Ready or not ready?
There’s no surefire way to tell when your jam is ready. Repetition, patience and observation are the key words here. You can test the preparation with a spatula: when the jam remains “attached” to it (as if it were in “love” with it), it’s probably ready. Another technique is that of the freezer: we spread on a plate previously cooled in the freezer a line of jam, then we put it back in the freezer. If, after two minutes, you manage to draw a line with your finger without the jam moving, it’s time to put in a jar!
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