Hello all
I made some raspberry jam this morning. To take the worry of 'will it set, will not' out of it, I decided to add some apple juice (made like the one you make for apple jelly). I then used my dad's old method of measurements for jam, equal amount of sugar to fruit. This is how it went;
Cooked 1 1/2 punnet of raspberries in microwave for 3-4 minutes and left aside to cool.
1 large cooking apple, roughly chopped with skin and all, and cooked in water just under covering it. Mashed it when soft and left it in muslin bag to drain for 5-7 hours.
I ended up with;
300 ml. of raspberry pulp
200 ml. apple juice
To this, I added 500 gm. (1 gm. for 1 ml. of fruit) of white sugar and a 1 tbs. bottled lemon juice.
I slowly heated it until sugar was dissolved. Then boiled briskly until setting point, roughly 10 minutes.
It never reached the correct setting temperature (it never does with me, though I have 2 jam thermometers!), but it passed the chilled plate test and dropping from the ladle in triangle test.
I poured it in hot jars after 5 minutes.
It set beautifully, just had some with toast.
This so much simpler than going shopping for pectin or pectin sugar every time you want to make a jam.
One new thing I learnt today, jam setting temperature is worked out this way:
Check temperature of boiling water where you live and your jam setting temperature is 8F higher than that. It makes sense. Not sure where I am in relation to sea lavel. Now I know why my jam never reached the correct temperature 220F!
I am thinking of adding this recipe to the site (yes I did take some pictures), but it will be nice if someone else could try this out too to make sure it works.
Thanks
Mamta