TOMATO JAM

Several years ago I made a tomato pate using small cherry tomatoes.  I used it as an appetizer and made enough that I would be taking it to friends' homes when invited over for a meal.  I had been thinking about making this pate again as the recent tomato haul from the garden was pretty good.  There are lots of tomatoes to use and to just freeze them doesn't help me as there are still frozen tomatoes in the freezer from last summer.  Recently a friend posted a recipe on facebook for tomato jam that she had just made.  She thought it was great.  This recipe is a bit different than the one I made several years ago.  I thought I would try it as variety is always good.  The original recipe called for 3/4 of a cup of sugar but I thought that would be too much so I decreased the quantity.  I also used only 1/2 tsp of red pepper flakes instead of a full teaspoon.  I don't always seed tomatoes when using in recipes but I did seed these and it does make a difference especially as the tomatoes are cooked down and you don't want to a concentration of tomato seeds.  For the tomato pate recipe that I made several years ago, the cherry tomatoes were not seeded (that would have been a futile exercise seeding small cherry tomatoes) and I found it to a very dense seedy pate.

What do you use tomato jam for?  Tomato jam can be used in place of ketchup, on a cracker with cheese, as an ingredient in salad dressing, in a grilled cheese sandwich or used as the sauce in a pizza.

To cook the jam, I used a Staub cast iron cooking pot.  Le Creuset or other heavy cooking pots would also work to cook this jam for several hours and not worry about it sticking to the bottom of the pot.  The jam is very good and the red pepper flakes add enough zip to make it more of a bolder taste.

Jam starting to cook for the next few hours.

INGREDIENTS:

1/3  cup sugar
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/4 cup water
10 cups of ripe tomatoes, skinned, seeded, coarsely chopped
1 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)
1/2 tsp kosher salt

DIRECTIONS:

Add the sugar, vinegar and water to a 6 quart heavy duty cooking pot.  Heat to a boil, reduce heat to medium and cook for about five minutes.  Stir occasionally as you want the liquid mixture to be a bit syrupy.  Add the tomatoes, red pepper flakes and salt.  Heat to a boil and reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook for about 2 to 2.5 hours until the tomato jam has thickened.  Stir occasionally especially as it thickens.  Season with more salt if required and let cool.  Place into small jars and either keep in the fridge or freeze.  If left in the fridge it should last for several weeks.  Makes about 3 cups.

Adapted from www.finecooking.com

MIXED BERRY JAM

With the abundance of berries including cherries from the backyard trees, I thought I would make mixed berry jam.  We have bought mixed berry jam at Costco but I thought I could make great jam.  It is easy to make mixed berry jam.  When I make jams, jellies, relishes or pickles and need to use warm sterilized jars, I sterilize the jars in the oven at 200 degrees F for at least 10 minutes.  I also gently boil the lids in a small pot of water to sterilize them.

Cooking the berry jam.

Jars cooling on the counter. 

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups crushed strawberries

2 cups crushed raspberries or cherries

2 cups blueberries

1/3 cup water

4 cups sugar

1 box Certo light or regular pectin crystals

DIRECTIONS:

Combine pectin with 1/4 cup of sugar in a small bowl.  In a large pot add the berries and water.  Stir the pectin mixture into the fruit.  Cook over high heat until the mixture comes to a full boil.  Stir in the remaining sugar.  Continue to cook and stir over high heat until the mixture comes to a full rolling boil.  Boil hard for one minute stirring constantly.  Remove from heat. 

Stir and skim the foam for five minutes.  Pour into warm sterilized jars filling up to 1/4 inch from the rim.  Seal while hot with warm sterilized lids.  Makes about six to seven - 250 mls jars.  Adapted from www.kraftcanada.com

CHERRY JELLY

Making jelly can be easy or hard depending on the equipment you have.  A dear friend of mine decided she was getting too old to fuss with making jams and jellies and so she loaned to me, on a permanent basis, her steam juice extractor.   It is a wonderful toy to use to make juice.  With the bumper crop of cherries in my backyard, I decided to make cherry jelly.

There are a number of methods you can use to get the juice from the cherries.  Using the steam extractor made it pretty easy to extract the cherry juice.

The brand name of the steam juice extractor I used to get the juice from the cherries. 

Set up on the stove to extract the juice.

The cherries just need to be washed.  You can leave the stems on and of course you don't have to pit the cherries. 

The cherry juice in the tubing used to drain the juice out of the pot. 

What the cherry juice looked like. 

I needed to measure the quantity of juice being extracted.

An inside view of the juice collected from steaming the cherries.

The finished product. 

INGREDIENTS:


3 1/2 cups of cherry juice
3 1/2 cups of sugar
1 tsp almond flavouring
1 box of certo pectin crystals

DIRECTIONS:


Add the juice to a large saucepan.  Add the pectin crystals and almond flavouring and mix well.  Bring the fruit to a rolling boil on high heat.  Stir in the sugar.  Return to a full rolling boil and boil for one minute, stirring constantly.   Remove from heat.  Stir and remove foam for the next five minutes.

Pour immediately into warm sterilized jars filling to within 1/4 inch from the rim.  Seal with warm sterilized lids.  Let stand at room temperature overnight before storing away.  Makes about 6 - 250 ml jars.  Adapted from www.kraft canada.com