Actually, I don't eat a lot of jam. If I'm going to eat a peanut butter sandwich, I usually choose creamed honey to go on it. However, last year a friend of mine who wins lots of awards at county fairs for her jam making skills hooked me up with a variety pack of home-made jams. I realized then that it was store-bought jam that was really inferior to honey, and that there might be a place in my heart for good jam.
So I've been planning on trying my hand at some jam making. It just so happened that my wife was planning on doing the same thing as a fun activity for the little blonde one, so, again, two problems with one solution!
Kendra had decided on making mango jam. This surprised me since we've never bought mangos before in our lives. But I was game, so we set some time aside and I started cutting them up.
Cutting mangos up sucks. They have a big teardrop shaped pit in the middle, but it's not like a peach pit, where you can tear it out at some point. You have to carefully cut all the way around the mango pit instead. Bleah. It's also HUGE. After peeling and pitting, I was surprised how little mango there was in our mangos. Also, they were kind of weird mangos. They weren't green and round, they were kind of yellow and pear shaped.
Once the mangos were cut up, my daughter went to town pounding them with a potato masher. It's so great to watch her get interested in cooking and helping out!
This is not fancy cooked jam. This is freezer jam, and it's made with a box of pectin, and basically from the box instructions. However, jam is a somewhat tricky thing because of how pectin interacts with fruits, etc. You need the amounts to be close to what the instructions ask for or else your jam won't set, for example.
After we mushed all the mangos we found that we didn't really have as much as the recipe required, so my wife suggested that we make up the difference with strawberries. That actually sounded pretty good, so we got some out and started mashing them, too!
Then we added the sugar, lemon juice, and pectin,mixed it up, and let it sit for a while to make sure they incorporated properly.
Since it was freezer jam, that was about it. We put it in Tupperware and some went in the fridge and the rest into the freezer!
Results: Good! It's got a very nice balance of flavors with mango and strawberry. I can recommend it if you like those flavors at all. I'd eat more of it, but, as you'll see in the next post, my jam adventures continued quickly!
