One thing we’ve talked about already on this blog is that you can make jam with your bread machine. This is especially awesome if you have some kind of fruit tree or bush in your back yard. I don’t know about you, but we have a lot of trouble eating all the fruit that our tree makes. So for example, if you have a cherry tree you could make some cherry jelly. Mmmmmmm. I love cherries. For this tutorial, I got some plums from a tree in our back yard and used our bread machine to make jam with the plums.
The ingredients are pretty simple. Besides the plums, you will need lemon juice, water, the pectin, and sugar. I like to use Pomona’s Universal Pectin. The reason for this is that you can make jam without a ton of sugar. Other fruit pectins require that you add tons of sugar so that the jam will gel up and get thick. Pomona’s is activated with calcium. The calcium comes in the package with the pectin so you can add the right amount to the bread machine when you’re making it.
I used plums but here is a list of other kinds of fruit you can make jam, jelly, and marmalade out of: strawberry, raspberry, kiwi fruit, gooseberry, blueberry, pineapple, cherry, currant, apricot, peach, blackberry, oranges, mandarin oranges, apples, blackberries, grapes, peppers, or even prickly pears. Most bread machines will make jam.
Plum Jam – Made With Bread Machine
Makes two and a half cups of jam.
- 2 cup plums – cut up and mashed (~16 smallish plums)
- 1/2 cup sugar or equivalent sweetener
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 1 1/2 tsp pectin powder
- 2 tsp calcium water (mixed per instructions that come with the Pomona’s package.)
- Slice the fruit up into 1/2 cubes and mash. If desired, you can soften them up by cooking a little.
- Stir lemon juice and calcium water into plum mixture.
- In separate dish, mix sugar and pectin.
- Dial up the jam setting on your breadmaker, add the plum and pectin mixtures. Press start.
Depending on your bread machine, cooking should take about an hour and a quarter. Figure 20 minutes for preparing the ingredients.
Here’s the finished product on some gluten-free bread. I really love this jam. It kind of tastes like cherries, actually, which sort of makes sense considering that cherries and plums are pretty closely related. I really love making jam and when I do, a little extra fun is to actually use some canning jars to can some up. Something else that’s really cool is that you know what’s in your jam when you eat it. There isn’t some kind of ingredient that sounds like it belongs in a chemistry set instead of your jelly.