On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 03:58:34 +0100, Brian Mitchell wrote:

a jam-making machine? (I hope this isn't too OT)
Where ingredients go in one end and jam comes out the other?
Last year I tried making blackberry jam (preserve?), following all
recipes and instructions **to the letter**.
I still have four impenetrable jars of blackberry toffee and four jars
of a preserve so fluid you have to hold the bread precisely level in all
directions.

Hi Brian,

I have made jam for the first time this year. Haven't really checked it
yet, but it seems OK, over solid if anything I suspect - but better than
runny!

(Just a mad idea - mix your toffee and runny jam together and get
something in the middle????)

Jam is roughly equal amounts of fruit and sugar PLUS a dose of pectin to
get it to set.

My method was to gently heat the fruit, sugar and pectin together until
all the sugar had disolved and melted, and you have a consistent glop in
the pan (you can pre-crush or crush as you go on the fruit, depending what
sort of finish you want. You then bring it up to a rolling boil (its
there when you can't stir the bubbles back in), and then let it rolling
boil for 4 mins. Then straight into hot jam jars.

You can either buy jam making sugar, which has the pectin built in, or
However, if you can find a supermarket doing it (a large ASDA did the
trick for me), you can buy boxes of pectin powder (a Silver Spoon
product) and normal sugar, which works out much cheaper. The boxes
contain 3 sachets - each sachet does 1kg of sugar. I paid £1.29 for a
box, whereas the jam making sugar was about £1.29/kg.

I made my jam in small batches in my largest steel saucepan - did make it
easier to cope with than making a large single batch.

HTH, Sarah