Backyard Blackberries
I must confess that I’ve fallen in love again . . . this time with a tart jam I just made. And for someone who considers herself a foodie, I have another confession: I don’t even know the variety of plum I used in this jam! Last week, as an I was on my way back to the car with my impatient son and I just remembered I wanted to make plum jam – please don’t whine – I’ll be super fast stop at an unknown vendor’s stand at the farmer’s market, I grabbed some very large dark purple, but otherwise nondescript plums.
Then, when I got home and cut one open, I found a lightly perfumed hard white interior. I don’t know what I was expecting, really, but it wasn’t that. I’m spoiled by extremely juicy and fragrant nectarines and peaches I buy at the farmer’s markets I frequent. I had hoped for something that essentially screamed RIPE PLUM as the skin opened. So I waited a few days before making jam while I thought about the three pounds of plums sitting on my counter. And I went into the backyard and picked as many ripe blackberries as I could wrestle from the thorny brambles that grow in one corner. And I decided to make blackberry plum jam. I figured the blackberries would lend a gorgeous color and rich flavor, which it seemed the plums lacked.
Now a disclaimer: I detest sickly sweet jams, and have avoided eating jam most of my life because of this. I also dislike the jelled consistency of most of them. Even though I made many jellies and jams years ago, I never ate them. They were just given away as holiday gifts. I made all of them from the standard pectin box recipes and from canning cookbook recipes. Sad though it may be, I never, ever considered altering the recipes to suit my taste. I never even considered I could like jam at all. Until I read Molly Wizenberg’s recipe for berry jam in the June 2008 issue of Bon Appetit. She, once again, single-handedly changed my life. No overstatement there at all. Something about her description of how simple and delicious pectin-free jam making could be made me drag my sorry behind down underneath the house to retrieve my ancient metal canning pot. She made me want to like jam! So a month ago, I made apricot jam using her recipe, which is simply apricots, sugar, and lemon, period. Then I made a second batch using lime instead of lemon, and I went crazy for the tart, fresh taste. I was hooked.
This time, I looked for pectin-less blackberry plum jam recipes on the internet, but gave up and decided to simply adapt Molly’s recipe. (She hadn’t listed plums as an option for her recipe, so I was worried it wouldn’t set well or something.) The recipe that follows is one part adaptation, one part necessity, and one part miracle. The miracle is that it produced the most perfect jam for me: tart, richly flavored, and perfectly, softly spreadable. (Please follow regular canning instructions found all over the web or here at Epicurious, where Molly’s recipe resides. Actually, it’s from a friend of a friend of Molly’s, but that’s how recipes are, aren’t they? You can also simply freeze the jam, which I have never tried, or refrigerate for up to 2 weeks. This recipe made five delicious 1/2 pints.)
Blackberry Plum Jam
2 1/4 pounds nondescript plums
8 ounces blackberries
2 1/2 cups sugar
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
Pit and quarter the plums. Toss them with the blackberries, the sugar, and the lemon juice in a large bowl and let sit for 2 hours. Prepare canning jars as per canning instructions. Transfer fruit mixture to a large pot and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Use a potato masher to smash the fruit chunks. Reduce heat to medium and gently boil for 35 minutes, stirring often. At this point, take a metal spoon and dip it in the mixture. Hold it over the pot, let it drip a moment to cool, and then run your finger down the back of the spoon, through the mixture. If your finger leaves a clear path on the spoon, the jam has cooked enough. Otherwise, cook for 10 more minutes and try the test again. (I swear, I can never, ever get the other tests – frozen plates, drops sheeting off the spoon, to work for me, and my jam always turns out just fine!) Once cooked, spoon into prepared jars and process according to jam canning instructions.
