A New Jam Partner

I know I've been writing a lot about jam. But, you see, it's one of those seasonal things. The fruit ripens. It's harvested and sold. Jam makers, like me, buy it and have about 48 hours to capture the essence of summer in a jar. I'll be journaling about jam until fall, when the last of the fruit has been picked and canned; we hunker down for winter and, occasionally, enjoy a reminder of summer when we eat our jam.

We made our usual Tuesday trip to Sacramento this week, stopped at our favorite strawberry stand and bought blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries just picked that morning. For $3 I also bought a "bucket" of over-ripe berries for jam. Wednesday morning when my jam partner was a "no show" I recruited Verne to help. As I've been finding out through my jam making experiences, cherries and strawberries, to a lesser degree, are labor intensive with preparation of the fruit. Here's my new helper hulling strawberries...

I started with the pectin recipe, but reduced the pectin from an entire box to 2-1/2 tablespoons or half a box. I was out of vanilla beans so substituted with a vanilla powder. I would say the resulting jam was practically perfect in every way (that's a line from Mary Poppins that we Moser's use a lot around here). Actually, the consistency was near perfect, but the flavor missed the mark a bit as the vanilla powder did not impart the same intense vanilla flavor I achieved in earlier attempts. That brings me to my vanilla experience.

The first strawberry vanilla reduction I made had a wonderful vanilla flavor. I used my last vanilla bean purchased a few years ago from Penzey's. Have I told you about Penzey's? I'll try to leave that for another post...it's hard, because I am passionate about Penzey's spices. Anyway, the bean was past its prime, but still provided an unmistakeable vanilla flavor to the jam. A few days later I was going to make jam again and was desperate because I'd used my last vanilla bean. Verne was going to be in Jackson, so I asked him to pick up vanilla beans at Safeway. He came home with a jar with one bean in it (and I later discovered it was $10 for that single bean). It was waxy, lacked the fragrance of the Penzey's beans; and, not surprisingly, provided nothing to the jam. My experiment with vanilla powder wasn't much better. Yes, it was a bit beyond it's prime, way past it's expiration date, OLD! (Spices don't "go bad" as they age, they get tasteless!) What did I expect? So, my latest strawberry vanilla jam will be labeled as "strawberry" and, as such, it is very good...practically perfect.

I won't be making any more strawberry jam until I receive my order of Penzey's Madagascar vanilla beans -15 for about $36...quite the deal as compared to that plastic, tasteless vanilla bean from Morton & Bassett of San Francisco sold at Whole Foods and other quality markets. If you haven't already signed up for the Penzey's catalog, do so and begin receiving your gift with purchase each month! Or, visit your local Penzey's store if you're so lucky as to have one!