Friday 15 September 2017

The plum production line no. 1 - plum jam

plum jam Sept 17 (2)

We swapped jam for a large amount of plums recently. Sackloads of them! They don't last so most were stoned and then frozen. That left us with one sack to deal with. By then the plums were very ripe and had to be processed. I boiled them all up and then put the pulp through a jelly bag. The resulting liquid is for wine making but the left over pulp was pressed through a sieve to collect a puree. The pulp left over from that had a bit of water added and was reboiled for a couple of hours. This was to extract the maximum pectin from the stones. Following this the pulp was put through a sieve a second time, creating a watery puree high in pectin.

Two litres of this was used to boil up 4 kg of plums from the freezer. 6kg of sugar were added and the result was 21 jars of plum jam.

plum jam Sept 17 (3)

Watch out over the next few weeks for posts on making plum wine, plum ketchup and plum chutney.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just like you I make tonnes of jam but was disturbed at the amount of sugar we were consuming. I now use low sugar pectin which I need to buy but at least it's healthier. Mind you, the way you eat (fresh, pesticide-free, variety) you're going to live forever.