Jammin'

It has been a bumper crop for all the fruit this year and we thought it was about time we made some jam.  The abundance of damsons made the fruit an easy choice. Picking damsons can be labour intensive so we opted for the 'olive picking' style.  Place a sheet on the ground and then shake the tree.

Before long we had a tub full of damsons; I would say in the region of 15 Kg.  This was just from a couple of the trees, there is so much fruit left on there still.

Next stage was to wash the fruit and put it in the biggest saucepan we had and start to mash it up using a potato masher as we heated it up.  This gets the stones free from the fruit and leaves a pulpy mess.

Next job is to remove the stones and skin from the pulp.  To do this we placed a large colander over a mixing bowl and poured some of the pulp into the colander.  Using a wooden spatula we stirred until we were left with skin and stones.

Although this mixture would produce a jam we wanted didn't want cloudy jam so we passed it through a nylon mesh to filter out any pulp that had got through the colander.  Meanwhile the dishwasher was washing the jam jars to make sure they were sterile.

The juice from here was put into the jam pan. We had about 10 pints (almost 6 litres) of juice which we then heated up on the stove.  As it heated up we began to add the jam sugar, the first 3 Kg didn't sweeten the juice much so we added more and kept tasting until we got the right sweetness.  Once it was sweet enough we went for the 'rolling boil', it's important to get the temperature high enough to form jam.  Now it was time to place a plate in the fridge and the jars into the oven to dry them; 120 C is enough to do this in a fan oven.

The colour was amazing as you can see in the picture.  Every so often we kept tasting and adding a little sugar then testing a teaspoon full on the cold plate.  Once we got a set on the cold plate I made the call 'We have Jam'.  Time to act quickly (if you take too long the jam can become like a hard jelly) now and get the jars from the oven.  Using a jam funnel (thanks Sheila) we topped up the hot jars with jam and screwed the lids on. You have to do it hot as this will form the vacuum that pulls the lid down.  

The end result was 15 one pound jars of damson jam.  However my hands were bright red 

and the kitchen looked like Sweeny Todd had been at work!