Lesley has a lovely canning and pickling book written by a British author (Jellies, Jams & Chutneys by Thane Prince) that she has been letting me peruse at the office. The recipes are deceptively simple and the pictures of a quality that entice you to commit serial weekends to culinary feats that are just a hair beyond sane. It’s the perfect book when you have ten apricot trees ripening outside!
That said, this book’s recipe for apricot jam called for blemish free just-ripe apricots. But as we run an organic ship around here, we don’t get perfect grocery store apricots. Ripe, sumptuous, sun warmed, and perfectly kissed with a blush of pink…yes. Blemish free…not always. In addition to that, the apricots I pulled off the tree the week I wanted to make jam were not barely ripe. They were VERY ripe.
I’m a novice jam maker, which means technically I’m still at the state where I double and triple check multiple recipes trying to get everything “just so”. Worried about the jam not setting, worried about the jars not sealing, worried that somehow my genius self will be the one that infuses perfectly safe acidic jams with a mutant strain of botulism. But on a good week (and the week I made jam out of WMA apricots was a good week), I can toss all that aside and make and can jam with the same abandon that I cook dinner, which is to say I wing it.
So that lovely British recipe that deems my apricots too soft, too mushy, and too spotty for good jam? Poppycock.
I rinsed the apricots well, cut out the spots that were brown, quartered the remainder (instead of dicing or pureeing it), and cut the sugar content of the recipe by half to compensate for the riper state of the apricots. I also doubled the batch (which all the recipes say is a no no), so I added an extra bit of pectin on an add, test, add, test basis til the cold plate test method had it as thick as I wanted it.
The result is a sweet-tart jam that is smooth and spreadable in some places and a little chunky in others, and tastes just fabulous over sharp English cheddar and pear with Triscuits, or mixed into morning oatmeal.
¡Viva el experimento!
Lindsey works at Weston Miles Architects as a sustainability coordinator and part-time blog and website guru, among other tasks. She is formally educated in passive energy conservation and design, but is an environmental enthusiast in pretty much all areas one can be.