C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 14 May 2016 19:40:48 -0300

Had enough empty jars to make some more jam, and was thinking I'd have
to experiment with kiwi, pear and apple through winter.  But when I
got to the market there were some late plums available.  Since I
didn't make any plum jam in the summer, and it's a flavour I remember
from home, I decided to change plans.

I bought 3.5 kg of plums and somehow, after removing the stones, still
had 3.5 kg to add to the pan.  To that I added 2 kg of sugar (mixed
white and brown) and the juice of two (rather small and dry) lemons.

I only quartered (or halved, for small fruit) the plums, and so was a
littl concerned about the initial heating and added a little (less
than 100 ml) of water.  It took an hour of gentle heating to bring to
the boil and then maybe a couple more of rolling boil - I had to
reduce things quite a bit.  At one point i squashed a few fruit pieces
with the spoon, but I suspect they would have fallen apart anyway.

These days I tend to cook jam, stirring every 10-15 min, until it
starts to bubble "thicker" ("gloopier") and "catch" on the bottom of
the pan.  Usually I can scrape the pan bottom clean and keep cooking
and stirring for another 15-30 min.  But this time it seemed to burn
faster.  I couldn't remove the burnt roughness from the pan bottom
while stirring so decided to stop heating.  The consistency on a spoon
was only so-so, but I didn't want to mess up the pan or get a burnt
flavour in the jam.

Total output was 3.5 kg (1 litre jar and 5 x 0.5 litres, all full).
Since the jars are full, I'll save them all and taste (apart from pan
scrapings, which seemed fine) later.

Andrew