The Wildest Blackberry Jam Maybe Ever

a secret to fine jam making is revealed + bonus sorbet

“The Secret Ingredient is there is no secret ingredient.”

— Kung Fu Panda

My grandmother taught me how to garden and make jam to preserve the sunny summer flavors for the winter. I’ve improved on her recipes through trial and error and I have a technique I developed that helps to protect the flavors and avoid cooking your delicate and “peak ripe” fruit into oblivion. It’s not a secret ingredient, but a process method that could take your jam making up a notch or two. It doesn’t take any special equipment, just a little more care with one extra step. I think you will agree it’s worth it.

There are several factors you need to decide about your jam. First, you can make it from almost any fruit, I prefer berries (red raspberries, black berries, blue berries, strawberries, etc.), but it’ll work for stone fruits (cherries, apricots, peaches and nectarines), pomegranates and more. My preference is to try to preserve the true fruit flavors without too much sugar and I usually avoid pectin. It’s gotten expensive and gives your preserves a “gelled” texture and it’s easy to over gel. I like the jam firm but slightly runny on toast or drizzled over yoghurt or ice cream. The main goal is to focus on the fruit flavor, so you ideally pick at the peak of ripeness when it’s the most sweet. As my neighbor at the ranch, the late Mr. Dodge, used to say “we need more heat for the berries to sweeten up”. Lots of sugar is how you make up for lack of sunshine, or if the fruit is store bought and picked green. So, like wine making, the wine is really made in the vineyard. Pick your fruit at the peak of ripeness for best results.

There are only three ingredients in this jam recipe; fruit, sugar and lemon juice. Of course, you can add other things, but I like simple things. It’s all about the technique and how you make your jam firm up and hold up through the canning process. Heat and cooking are the enemy of flavor. If you’ve ever made jam and wondered why the color is brown, or the flavors are flat, it’s likely been over cooked. Once you’ve had “lightly cooked” jam, you will never go back — I’m wagering you will become a jam snob.

The problem with fruit is the water content, which must be brought down through cooking to allow the sugar and fruit to work their magic, firming up the jam and preserving it. It’s a bit like candy making, truth be told and there is a temperature where the sugar works its magic. Boiling the mixture of course is the traditional way to eliminate the extra water and hit that temperature, but at what cost? So I came up with an idea for how to eliminate some of the water using freezing that achieves that goal without all the cooking and it really works well.

The basic recipe

9-10 cups of fresh wild blackberries

2-3 cups of sugar

1 lemon

(Makes just over six 8 ounce jars and about 3 cups of sorbet)

Mash the berries and sugar together and let sit for about an hour at room temperature. You can macerate in the fridge overnight as well, depending on your schedule.

Using a food mill or sieve, process about half the blackberries to remove the seeds. You’ll have less jam, but it won’t be as seedy — this is a matter of taste.

Here is the secret to the process…

Separate the liquids from the solids using a Chinois or sieve. Keep the solids in a bowl at room temperature.

Freeze the liquids until they are half frozen, this might take an hour or two. The water freezes first around the edges and the resulting unfrozen liquor in the center will be concentrated and syrupy. Pour that off into your cooking pot (we’ll cook that first). Reserve the frozen “water” berry juice ice and put it in the freezer in a freezable container with a snap lid — you now have delicious SORBET as an added bonus. Two for one!

Cook the liquids that resulted from the freezing and any other liquids you can separate with a spoon from the solids until they are jammy. You might want to add more sugar to taste. Once the liquids are jammy, add the solids.

You want to cook the solids as little as possible, just until boiling and a little past, depending on the test of your jam on a cold plate. It should be firm and not run much (this is according to your taste, some like it firmer, some less firm). You can add pectin at this point, but it’s not necessary if the fruit has a lot of natural pectin.

DO NOT OVERCOOK, many of the delicate esters have a boiling point right around that of water, you will have a great smelling kitchen, but the flavor will have boiled off out of your jam. You worked too hard picking those thorny blackberries to vaporize all the flavor by overcooking.

Put your jam into canning jars that have been boiled for 20 minutes (to sterilize them), removing the jars from boiling water with tongs. Don’t handle with your hands, except by the places not on the inside of the jar. Fill the jars up to about 1/2 inch from the top of the jar (as you would usually can). Carefully wipe the rims of the jars to remove any jam you might have spilled on the rims and put on the lid and screw on the sealing band.

Water process for 20 minutes. This is standard water bath canning.

After removing from the water bath, once the jars have cooled, turn the jars upside down and return to the counter top. This is to mix the jam so the seeds don’t float to the top of the jar. You want a nice even presentation so everyone notices the loving kindness you put into your jam making when they first lay eyes on the jam.

That’s it! Here are some photos so you can see how it was done…

I started with blackberries I’d picked. I didn’t have time to can right after picking (the best way), so I froze two sets of berries (picked on two weekends). These are the berries and because they had been frozen, the cell walls had been broken and liquids were starting to come out. I didn’t pick out the occasional flower petal, leaf or unripe berry — I’m lazy and that stuff all floats to the top during the cooking process. This was about 9-10 8 ounce jars worth of berries. I ended up with 6 and a half 8 ounce jars worth of jam and about 18 ounces of sorbet.

Wild blackberries are packed with flavor…and seeds. After adding about 2-3 cups of sugar, I ran about half the berries through the food mill and tossed out those seeds extracted by the food mill.

You will want to add the sugar to taste and based on how ripe the berries are. Riper berries don’t require as much sugar.

I use a Chinois (Chinese hat sieve) to separate the liquids from the solids. Liquids are collected in the measuring cup, then put in a snap lidded glass container in the freezer for an hour or two.

These are the remaining solids, very berry!

After freezing the liquids and pouring off the “liquor” syrup, we are left with this amazing sorbet. Toss it in the freezer and enjoy later!

The liquids are boiling while the solids wait their turn in the bowl on the left. The boiling is vigorous, the goal is to remove the water through boiling the liquids, while the solids retain nearly all of their flavor because after combination, they will not be cooked that much, preserving the esters that give the jam its flavor.

After mixing the solids with the cooked down liquids, the jam is brought just to the boiling point.

Always test the stiffness of the jam on a cold plate. This barely ran, so it’s ready (according to my taste).

These are unripe berries that floated to the top. I picked them out and discarded them.

Putting the jam in the jar was done with a ladle and canning funnel. Canning funnels are cheap and make the ladling of jam much easier. I dip a folded piece of paper towel in the hot water bath and wipe the rims to gently remove any spilled jam. This would not allow a proper seal if there were jam on the rims.

Jars are carefully lowered into boiling water for 20 minutes (note the time you put them in or use a timer).

That’s it. Now we have wild blackberry jam for the winter! Let me know how this freezing technique works for you. I’ve been using it for 5-6 years now and the quality of my jam has markedly improved. Good luck!