Jam Festival: Recipes from fruits and berries
Text: Karina Sembe
Homework for the winter are completely worth hours, spent in the kitchen for sterilizing cans and boiling water: natural snacks from your favorite fruits in unusual combinations are not easy to find in the supermarket. Last week we offered vegetable preparations for every taste - from pickles in marinades to stews and salads - and today we chose some boring recipes from seasonal fruits and berries. Sugar in large quantities is not our friend, but no one has canceled a healthy measure. The number of ingredients in the recipes of jam and confitures is 1.5-2 liters of the finished product, and the proportions for pickled fruits - per 1 liter of syrup (about 400 ml of water are placed in a liter jar). For the conservation wisdom, please refer to our detailed guide.
Pear confiture with ginger
Confiture confiture is different, it all depends on the author: someone loves to puree fruit, and for some it is important to keep translucent pieces of fruit, some cooks do not do without dried peel, while others always use gelatin. For a start, we recommend a proven recipe without a haunting citrus flavor and questionable additives.
Ingredients:
Cooking:
Wash pears, peel, cut into 4 parts, remove the seeds. Finely chop the pears, a little pulp (approximately) puree in a blender. Squeeze the juice from the lemons and mix it with mashed potatoes, add chopped pears. Peel ginger, cut into small cubes and mix with pears, add sugar, salt and cinnamon. Constantly stirring, bring the fruit to a boil and cook for about 15-20 minutes. Take out the cinnamon sticks and pour the confiture over the sterilized jars.
Peaches in vanilla syrup
This simple preparation will give a hundred points ahead to any restaurant dessert - the main thing is to choose juicy peaches with a rich taste.
Ingredients:
Cooking:
Peaches wash, dry, cut in half. Take out the seeds and dip the fruit in boiling water for 1 minute, and then immediately in the cold - so you can easily remove the peel from the peaches. Peeled peach halves tightly lay on the bottom of dry sterilized cans (fill the jars to the very edge). Prepare a syrup: boil water in a saucepan, add sugar and vanilla. When the sugar has dissolved, bring the syrup to a boil again and hold it on medium heat for 2 minutes. Hot syrup pour the peaches in jars.
Rhubarb jam with raspberries
It would seem that the rhubarb season is long past, but in the markets and fairs now and then there are grandmothers with bunches of selected pinkish stems. Jam is obtained with a delicate aroma, and this recipe is one of the simplest and is suitable for the first harvest in life.
Ingredients:
rhubarb - 1.2 kg
raspberry - 400 g
sugar - 900 g
Cooking:
Peel the rhubarb and cut into small slices. In a deep container, mix it with sugar, leave it for a couple of hours, and send it overnight in a refrigerator so that the rhubarb makes juice. The next morning, pour the juice into a saucepan and boil it over low heat for a few minutes. Add raspberries and rhubarb, bring to a boil, mix again and boil over low heat for about 5 minutes, until the jam thickens.
Pickled plums
Those same snack plums are a legend and a classic: they are ideal for baked meat, tinctures and dessert. It is better to leave the stones in the plums - so the fruits will retain the characteristic hardness for this preparation.
Ingredients:
Cooking:
Put the washed plums into the pan, sprinkling them with bay leaf and cloves. For the marinade, mix the vinegar and sugar and bring to a boil, stirring. You can add a little boiling water to dissolve the sugar better. One way or another, most likely, small crystals will remain, but it does not matter. Plums are marinated for 5 days: every day, in the morning and in the evening, the marinade is drained and brought to a boil, and then the plums are poured over them. After 5 days, the plums are laid out in cans and preserved.
Urine apples with mint and honey
You can pickle apples with sugar, but the variant with honey and malt is more authentic. If you do everything right, you get a harmless snack, from which dependence is produced.
Ingredients:
Cooking:
Put the currant leaves on the bottom of the deep container, put the apples in two layers, cover them with cherry leaves. Then again two layers of apples - and so on, until the ingredients run out. Put the leaves on the top layer of apples, cover with a cutting board or a special wooden circle for soaking, put the load on top. In warm boiled water, dissolve all the ingredients for the marinade, and when they are completely cool, mix the marinade and pour into the container with the apples, without removing the load. Make sure that during soaking the board or circle is always covered with liquid, otherwise the apples will spoil. Soak the apples need for a month at a temperature of 15-18 degrees, so that capacity is the place on the balcony.
Apricot jam
This classic jam will have the way to breakfast and make an excellent company of black tea and toast with butter. Choose soft, thin-skinned apricots; for tasteful experiments, we recommend trying the pineapple variety and adding some pineapples.
Ingredients:
apricots - 1.5 kg
sugar - 800 g
lemon juice - 1 tbsp. l
Cooking:
Divide the washed apricots into halves and remove the bones, and then place the fruit in a deep pan, cover it with sugar, stir and leave for 2-3 hours so that the sugar will melt. Put the pot on the fire, add lemon juice and mix well again. Bring the apricots to a boil and remove the froth. Chop the fruit to the desired consistency with a dip blender and cook over medium heat until thick (30-40 minutes), stirring occasionally. To check the consistency, put the jam on the plate: if the drop does not spread, the jam is ready.
Black chokeberry jam with walnuts
Nuts in jam can hardly be called a popular culinary process, but in fact it is an ancient method: it is nutritious and tasty. The tartness of the nuts perfectly complements the astringent taste of mountain ash. There is even a jam of walnuts alone, but for a start - a compromise option.
Ingredients:
Cooking:
Rinse the berries and pour boiling water overnight. In the morning of sugar and one cup of infusion boil the syrup. Apples cut into small cubes, chop nuts. Peel the lemon and chop it finely. Send the berries, nuts and sliced apples into boiling syrup, boil twice for 15 minutes with a break of a couple of hours. During the second cooking, add sliced lemon to the jam. Before pouring the jam into the cans, let it stand for a couple of hours.
Spicy Pickled Watermelon
Relationships with salted watermelon are somewhat reminiscent of the story of olives and fermented cheese: growing affection for these products often speaks of growing up and being ready for an unusual taste. Some add aspirin to the preparation, but it is still better to save the medicine in case of a headache, and preserve the watermelon with a little vinegar.
Ingredients:
Cooking:
Peel the watermelon and slice it into pieces that are comfortable to put in a jar. You can pull out the bones. Put the slices of watermelon in a jar, while adding spices. For the marinade in boiling water, dissolve the sugar and salt and boil for another 2 minutes. Pour the marinade into the jars and cover with the lids to warm the watermelon, then drain the syrup and bring it to a boil again. At the end add vinegar and pour watermelon over boiling syrup. Roll up the jars immediately with sterilized lids.
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