Many years ago my mother sent my father out to get sour cherries, and he came home with sweet cherries. Lots of them. So she took our usual abundance of red raspberries and made a quantity of sweet cherry raspberry jam that has become legendary. It is quite possibly one of the finest red jams known to mankind.
Well, the other day I was walking into Trader Joe's and noticed a 3-lb container of sweet cherries on sale. I added in a few frozen packages of red raspberries (one of the fruits it is totally worth buying organic, by the way, because they absorb everything), and that evening I made up some jam.
Here's the recipe I used (I made two batches with my 3 lbs of cherries):
Sweet Cherry Raspberry Jam (aka Cherry-Berry Jam)
1 3/8 lbs cleaned and pitted sweet cherries
1 1/8 lbs frozen organic red raspberries
(or divide the fruit to get a total of 2 1/2 lbs of fruit in the proportions of your choice)
juice of one small lemon (two ice cubes of frozen lemon juice, in my case)
4 cups sugar
1 packet no/low-sugar pectin
Some recipes have you chop the cherries up, but I like how whole fruits feel in a jam. If you don't, this is the point where you chop up your cherries as you prefer them. The raspberries will fall apart in cooking any way you work it, especially if they have already been frozen, so don't bother spending too much time on them.
Put the fruit, sugar, and lemon juice into glass bowls and allow to macerate overnight. I prefer 24 hours.
The next day, prep your jam jars and water bath. Put the contents of the bowl on the stove and heat until sugar is dissolved in the juice. Mix in the packet of pectin.
Heat to a simmer and hold it there for one minute. Then test your set, skim the top (I skim it into a jar to put in the fridge: it's just foamy, not bad), and ladle the jam into the pots, cover, and process.
Makes 7-8 one-cup jars of jam, depending on how enthusiastic you are about skimming.
Technorati Tags: berries, cherries, jam, raspberries
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