One of our must-have pieces of equipment in the kitchen is Mason Jar! You can use it for many purposes like storing dry food, a jar of pasta/salad and more important our favourite Jam. April is the month of many seasonal fruits. From January till May we have mandarin, kiwi, kumquats and from April till August, we will have cherries and strawberry. This is the month where we will see all the fruit in the market. And it is time to make our favourite fruit jam.
Before making your Jam or Honey, remember to sterilize jars for all your lovely preserves. A clean sterilized jar is essential to the success and longevity of the jams and preserves you spend a lot of time making. Click here to find out how can you do so.
Strawberry Jam
On our top of the list, first came Strawberry Jam, from April till July, it is the perfect season for strawberry! While it’s easy to go buy a jar at the store – it’s just much more fun and so much tastier when you can whip up a jar for yourself in under an hour, right?
The beauty of this easy jam recipe is in the use of lemon juice and sugar instead of pectin to make the strawberry jam set. (Lemon juice is a natural pectin source that helps the jam set up and also helps prevent the growth of bacteria.)
The bright red colour of the jam simply brightens up my day every time we dig onto it!
Orange Marmalade Jam
Here come our favourite and Paddington Bear favourite – Marmalade!Every sunshiny spoonful makes your morning toast sparkle. If you love candied oranges and fruit preserves, we bet you’ll be making this regularly. Our recipe is not wildly complicated compare to what you see out there: peel this, but not too much, scoop out that, strain something else, then add it back in. Cut the citrus you have and add them to the pot with the rest of the ingredients. With the skin, you may taste a little bitter but the texture of the chewy skin is another level.
What is the difference between Orange Marmalade Jam and TraditionalMarmalade Jam? Yes, there’s a huge difference! The best marmalade is made from Seville oranges which have a very short season. The small sweet Spanish fruit is available at its best from mid-January for the next four weeks. Hence the new way of having non-traditionalMarmalade Jam, we make use of what we can get from the family tree – other oranges within the family tree.
Mixed Berries Jam
While it is best to use fresh fruit but there are times where we love to use our leftover frozen berries for jam. It tastes almost the same as using fresh fruit, not to mention how convenient it could be. Compare to the rest of the homemade jam recipes the mixed berries are on the sour side. We like to use it on our meat like meatball and chicken, as it will balance up the oily taste and make the flavour more balance. We use cranberry and blueberry for this recipe.
Peach Jam
While the season of peach is usually in the summer of the year (not yet there) but who doesn’t love to have some peach jam? Marmalade has complicated steps, Berries Jam is the easiest and for Peach Jam it is the tricky one. For the Peach Jam, you have to understand your fruits and choose the right one. Use ripe peaches. Not overripe, but soft and ready to eat. The skins come off a lot easier. If the skins don’t easily come off you should blanch the peaches. When you have the right fruit, the rest of the steps is just a piece of cake.
An alternative to this Peach Jam is to add some bourbon – Peach and bourbon come together in this delightfully tipsy drunken peach jam. With ripe summer peaches, a splash of lemon juice and more than a splash of bourbon, this might just be your new summer jam.
We use this jam in our doughnut recipe.
Pomelo Honey “Jam”
During the mid-lunar festival, we believed many families are loaded with pomelo. Most will eat the juicy flesh in throw away the skin. What most may not know is that the skin can be churned into dishes and jam, etc. In this recipes, you will learn how to skin the pomelo beautifully and how to make jam from the fruits.
There are many benefits to pomelos, such as prevent urinary tract infection, promote fast healing of wounds, prevent anaemia and even colds and flu. You can use this pomelo honey in your drinks by stirring them into tea or water, however, we love to drizzle them on our toast and pancakes too!
Which is your favourite jam from the above?
Looking at them again makes us want to stock up our homemade jam too.
xoxo, Joe
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