It's The Pits

So plum season is over, and actually has been for a few weeks now, which means that it's time to do something with this gallon bag of perfectly ripe plums that I've had stashed in my freezer.

And maybe the other two bags I collected this year too.

And by "do something" I mean "make plum jam" using this pectin I bought.

I decided to go with a low/no sugar pectin because jam is basically just fancied up sugar even when you don't add a bunch extra, and I figured I could do without the added calories.

Anyway, time to get these plums thawed, so the first bag goes in a sink full of hot water.

And we'll prep some other implements while we're waiting.

As you may recall from previous blog posts, I do enjoy a smooth jam that actually spreads, instead of having random golf ball sized chunks of fruit in the jar, thus I'll be making full use of the food processor.

So once the plums are thawed, I squish the pits out of them and put the flesh and peel in the food processor.

Then I give them a buzz to get them nicely pureed, and put them in the square tub while I work on pitting the next batch.

This produces about 2 quarts of puree for one gallon bag full of plums.

And a nice pile of pits.

Now the ratio specified on the pectin container works out to 15g of pectin to each pint of prepared fruit, which means that I have theoretically enough pectin for 5 quarts of fruit. So I guess we'll see how that works out.

And yes, I know I'm using mixed units. Deal with it.

In the meantime, it's full steam ahead with the other two bags.

And after some more pit-squishing, we get just a little less than 6 quarts of puree.

Well that's close enough to 5, it's probably fine. There's also probably a fair bit of air whipped into this. Either way, I'm glad to be done with the pitting.

And so we're on to the cooking. I'm splitting this in half since I don't want to deal with a bunch of sticky fruit boiling over, so into the pot goes half the fruit, plus 2 cups of water as specified in the instructions.

And half the jar of pectin is standing by waiting for the jam to come to a boil.

Then it gets stirred in and boiled for a full minute.

And then we fill the pint jars with the spaghetti sauce. I mean jam. The jam. We fill the jars with the jam.

Then repeat the process with the second batch.

I actually have enough proper canning jars that I could have used them for the extra, but I wanted to stop at 12 for the sake of keeping things even. The extra jar and the bowl will go in the fridge to get eaten first, since the reused jar isn't guaranteed to seal right, and the bowl is obviously just a bowl.

Speaking of sealing, it's time to process the jam to make it shelf stable, so out comes the canning kit.

And in go the jars.

10 minutes of cooking after it comes to a boil is about right for down here at sea level, and since these plums are very acidic we don't need to worry about pressure canning.

Once the 10 minutes is up, they come out to cool on a rack while the next batch goes in.

And second verse, same as the first.

Meanwhile the bowl of jam has been chilling in the fridge, so let's see how the pectin is doing with firming it up.

Hmm, yeah, it's probably fine.

In conclusion, I think this worked out pretty well. I did notice that the fruit was oxidizing pretty quickly, going from a bright red to a more muddy brown as I was pitting and pureeing, so I might try adding a bit of citric acid to the mix next time. If I do that, I'll definitely bump up to the "low sugar" recipe instead of the "no sugar" one, since this jam is quite tart as it is, and adding more acid might be a bit much.

But I've got plenty of time and 13 and 1/2 jars of jam to get through before I need to make any decisions about that.