My Secret Weapon for Making Jam with No White Sugar | Canning Tutorial

hey friends so the rhubarb is ready out in the garden and i thought it was time to can some jam because rhubarb jam is one of our favorites and i wanted to bring you along for the ride [Music] rhubarb is just kind of your classic farmhouse plant i love that you can see it in so many of the old farmsteads and homesteads around here probably because it's one of the few things that grows in wyoming without a lot of drama you just plant it and it does its thing but it's an awesome thing to have around because it is low maintenance and you can do so much with it so one of my favorite things to do with rhubarb is to make jam i like to mix it with strawberries or you can do things like rhubarb pie or rhubarb crisp and it freezes really well so it's most prevalent in the spring and summer and the one thing to remember about rhubarb is that these stalks are delicious but the leaves are actually poisonous so don't try to put the leaves in your salad and actually they're one of the few things that i pull from the garden that i don't end up giving to our pigs or chickens so the stocks are yummy but skip the leaves so for my jam i'm just going to wash these i don't have to peel the stalks and i'm just going to chop them to take the ends off there chop them into little sections before we put them in our pot to soften them up just a little bit i get my fruit ready i'm going to go ahead and get my tanning pot heating up because it can take a little while we'll get that on high i filled it about a third of the way so for a really long time i didn't like to make jam because maybe you've noticed this a lot of conventional jam recipes call for cups and cups of sugar and for some reason like when i get this beautiful fresh fruit the strawberries the blueberries whatever just felt wrong to mash them up cook them down and add five cups of white sugar in to preserve them so i avoid a jam for a long time until i figured out how to make jams and jellies without a ton of sugar and you can either make them low sugar or honey sweetened instead so that's what i wanted to show you today because i know a lot of you are in the same boat and it totally can be done so what i have working over here right now i have some rhubarb and some strawberries so what we just want to start with is four cups of mashed fruit and this can be blueberries or raspberries strawberries rhubarb of course peaches apples whatever you want the key is i just need to start with fruit that is soft or mashed so if i was using raw berries that are pretty soft on their own i could just mash them up as is and then add them to my pot but because rhubarb is a little crunchier when it's raw i went ahead and just softened it a little bit cooked it down on low just so it was mashable i also threw in some frozen strawberries and this is ready to go and you just need it and just mash this up to whatever consistency you like your jam to be i don't mind a few chunks in our homemade jam i don't like it giant whole strawberries but it's really up to you we're just gonna get it to a even consistency here so i just need four cups now you guys know i'm a little bit of a rebel in the kitchen and there are plenty of times when i don't follow directions on purpose but when it comes to jam it actually really is important to follow the ingredient amounts because if you don't it might not set up properly and you'll end up with some syrupy stuff instead of nice solid jam even though this has already been in the pot and cooked down just a tad to get it soft it's going to go ahead and measure it just to be safe to make sure i have four cups i think i'm pretty close i actually have a little bit more which is totally fine i'm just going to save that little extra back alrighty so we are good we have our four cups of mashed fruit i'm going to go ahead and add that into a stock pot or a saucepan make sure it's a pretty good size this one is my favorite pot for making jam just because it doesn't have the risk of boiling over so we're gonna get our four cups of mashed fruit in there and then i'm going to add a quarter cup of bottled lemon juice okay so we're gonna add a quarter cup of lemon juice into our fruit if you're wanting to do strawberry rhubarb like me i did i think about two cups of rhubarb and about two cups of strawberries pretty close anyway now we're gonna add the magic ingredient so i told you that this is going to be low sugar or honey sweetened jam now the trick to make jam without loads of white sugar is to use a special type of pectin pectin is simply the thing that makes your jams and jellies more set up versus syrupy so you can get pectin at your typical grocery store but all of those pectins require white sugar to make them perform properly it's magical because you can use honey as a sweetener or fruit juice or nothing at all and it will still set up it has two pieces there is a pectin packet and a calcium packet so what you want to do first before we get rolling with the rest of our jam is we want to mix up our calcium water so to do this we're going to put how much we're going to put a half a cup of water in a jar okay so we have half a cup of water in our little jar and then we're going to take the calcium packet open it up okay that's actually the whole packet so you can just dump the whole packet in there and give it a little stir and it'll dissolve now this you won't use all of this for this recipe but the good news is this will last in your fridge for a good number of months so you don't have to throw it out i have our calcium water mixed up i'm going to add two teaspoons of this special water into my mashed up fruit and lemon juice now we're headed back to the stove i'm going to get this going on medium low it depends on how hot your burner is my fruit was already a little bit cooked down just because i needed to get it soft enough to mash up if you're dealing with raw fruit let's say raw strawberries for example it won't take them long to heat up and get soft i let that go for a minute and i'm just going to keep an eye on it so it doesn't scorch on the bottom give it a stir every so often so while that's doing his thing i'm going to get my honey ready so in this bowl i have a cup of honey so i'm a huge fan of local raw honey and we eat that a lot on biscuits or bread or just whatever we're swirling into our yogurt it doesn't matter but when it comes to canning i tend to buy no i get it at costco costco honey as a sweetener because it's a little bit cheaper and it's going to be cooked anyway so it's not as important to be raw to start with so i have a cup of this costco honey in my bowl and now i'm going to grab my other packet that came in my pomona's box this is the pectin packet all right so i'm going to add two teaspoons of pectin into the honey some fruits contain a lot of pectin naturally and that's why maybe some of the older jam recipes you've seen floating around don't call for any additional pectin at all but i'll be honest i've tried those recipes and what it usually entails is you mashing your fruit and boiling it down for a very long time to get that natural pectin to show up and i don't know the results haven't been awesome for me so feel free to try those but at least in my experience i'd rather just add pectin additionally it's not a toxic ingredient it's very naturally occurring ingredient so it just doesn't bother me and it makes the jam process a whole lot easier one year i tried boiling down my jam i was determined to make a no additional added pectin jam i was on this mission and it took hours and i ended up scorching the bottom of the pan so badly it never recovered so this is a lot easier we're just mixing that pectin right into the honey as best as we can it's not going to be perfect that's all right and then we're just going to set that aside let's go over and check the fruit so we want this mixture to get to a full rolling boil and a rolling boil is a boil that continues to bubble even when you're stirring it so i had a few little bubbles popping up but not vigorous enough to be considered rolling so if you see if i take my spoon out it starts to bubble there but as soon as i stir it it goes away so it just needs a few more minutes it's super close and this is the part where i don't want to walk off and head outside and get distracted because this will burn on the bottom of your pot we're at a rolling boil when we get to that point now we get to add the pectin honey mixture into the fruit which is not always easy oh we've got the honey in there i'm going to try to get it mixed in as best as i can and once it's incorporated into the fruit we want this to boil hard like a rolling boil for at least a minute so you can set a timer if you need to or you can count in your head it doesn't matter we want to stir this pretty constantly because this is where we can start scorching stuff on the bottom of our pan which is not fun to clean up let me tell you this is the point where we're gonna start checking for um jelly and that's kind of the magic piece of jam making otherwise we have syrup which honestly if your jam doesn't gel it's not the end of the world you just pour it on your pancakes instead of spread it but obviously if we're making jam for a reason so if we can get it more solid that's awesome and this is the moment of truth so there's a couple different ways to check for this and what i've done to prepare for this moment is i have put a plate and a spoon into my very messy freezer and they have they're cold obviously they've been in the freezer they need to be cold because hot jam doesn't gel so if you're waiting for this hot boiling jam to show you that it is set up sufficiently it'll never get there until it's cold right so we need to get it cold in order to test for that gel factor so after this has been boiling hard for about a minute i can start the test and there's a couple different ways to do this okay the first thing i can do is i can take my cold saucer out of the freezer and put a drop or two of the jam on there and then i will stick it back inside for just a few minutes test is to take your cold spoon to dip it in the jam then if the jam runs off we want it to run off in a sheet and you can see how it's dripping off this jam is not quite ready so i'll show you again so if it pours off your spoon like that we're not to that gel point quite yet we need it to come off in a sheet so the tricky part here i don't want you to stress out about this it's not not a huge deal but if you don't boil enough your jam won't gel and if you boil too much your jam won't gel so there's kind of that sweet spot which is why we're checking here as we go i'm going to head back over here to my freezer and see how my little saucer is doing i might not have been here long enough but you can see now it's cold it's only been in here for i don't know two minutes but it's already it's cold and it's holding its shape so that's a great indicator that we're probably pretty darn close to that gel point so i'm happy with that i'm gonna call it good i'm gonna take my jam off of the heat and set it over here for just a minute so it's really important that before we put the jam in the jars that it's hot so i don't want to let that cool down completely but i have a few minutes before my water is hot enough so i'm going to get the rest of my canning equipment ready to roll two of my favorite canning tools are a jar lifter and a lid magnet so what i need to do first is put my glass jars into the hot water bath to get them sterilized for a little while before we put the food inside and this is especially important if you're doing water bath canning not so much if you're doing pressure canning our water is boiling i'm going to take these jars i could have actually put these in at the beginning but i forgot so we're going to take these jars and put them in the hot water make sure they're filled otherwise they'll float to the top and you can use whatever size jars you like most people don't can jam in quartz because we just use little bits of jam at a time so i like these little eight ounce jars or the four ounce jelly jars those also make really good gifts if you want to do a variety of jams for a christmas basket or something like that just a good size i like to let my jars sterilize for about 10 minutes so that'll give us just enough time to get everything else ready to go my best canning tip if you're new to canning and it feels stressful to you because i know it definitely felt stressful for me back in the beginning is to start with a semi-clean kitchen give yourself a little space both physically and mentally and i promise you the more you can the easier it gets so my jars are in here i'm going to get my rings ready to go just make sure i have enough set out i also have my lids now i always buy new lids for every canning project you can reuse the jars you can reuse the rings but i always have new lids so those are here i have my lid lifter i have my jar lifters we have our hot jam now we just wait a minute and we'll pull those jars out [Music] okay these have been going for a while they're all nice and sterilized i'm gonna carefully dump the water out and transfer them over to my towel [Music] it's just important that when you're canning that basically everything be hot you want hot jars and hot food oh the funnel gotta have the funnel okay jam and we get to fill our jars and i would recommend a ladle i'm going to fill this to one quarter inch headspace so headspace varies depending on what food you're canning but generally the rule with jams and jellies is you want it pretty close to the top so i usually get close-ish and then i come back as i keep going here and i am a very messy canner there will be jam all over my kitchen by the time i am done with this project the cool thing about this you guys is this really isn't hard and honestly there have been many a time where i've just kind of had the wild hair to go can some rhubarb jam i had it in a gardener i had something in the freezer and it's really not complicated i think we have this perception that a canning project has to be an ordeal and it has to take all weekend and sure there are times when you're canning a truckload of tomatoes and it might take a while but if you're just squirreling away little bits of food here and there it doesn't have to be a thing it can be actually pretty relaxing put on some music put on your favorite podcast and just roll with it here's how i like to do it i get it mostly full and then i just take my ladle and just get it that last little bit be about a quarter inch from the top of the food to the top rim of the jar and the reason head space is important is if it is too much or too little there's a good chance your lids won't seal and that's really the most important part of canning because unsealed lids means that the food is not shelf stable and it kind of defeats the purpose so we have food in the jars now i just take a damp paper towel or a dish rag and you just want to wipe the rims to get rid of any residue so it's crucial like i mentioned that these lids seal now if they don't seal you don't have to throw the food away you just want to eat it within about a week but my goal with this jam is to put it in my pantry for this winter when it's cold and snowy and we can have rhubarb and strawberries on our biscuits so i need those lids to seal for that to happen in a safe manner now i'm going to take my lids back in the day the lid manufacturers would tell you that you needed to gently heat these in some warm water before you put them on the jars and they have since come out and said that's not 100 necessary so i don't worry with that stuff anymore i just gently set them right on the lid [Music] or excuse me i set them right on the jar not on the lid get them in the middle as much as possible and then grab my rings and i'm just going to screw these down finger tight so sometimes i see people doing this and that's what you don't want to do we just i like just to turn it till it turns the jar on its own just with my fingertips i'm not reefing on this and that's good enough so i'll show you again so they're close enough the goal is to leave enough wiggle room for if we need a little liquid to escape or little air to escape it has that ability and if they're too tight that won't happen and then we won't get seals now we are ready to transfer these back over to our boiling water another reason it's super important to start with hot jars is if we were to put cold jars into this boiling water we're probably going to have a little bit of an issue with cracking and i sometimes i still have jars crack or break even when i've done everything right it just happens maybe the jar had a hairline fracture you didn't see but you can generally avoid that by making sure you have hot jars going into the hot water i have room for up to seven little jars in here but i'm probably not going to use all of my spaces attempting to stack these little guys but don't do it it will definitely affect how well they seal last one now i don't know if you can see this but you need to have at least an inch of water covering the tops of those jars and i'm i'm probably about half inch or less so i'm going to fill in a little bit more water to make sure i have enough as we boil it doesn't boil down and leave the tops of the jars exposed since we added that cold water in it's going to take just a minute for this to come back up to temperature so i'm going to put my lid on turn it on high and let this do its thing and just kind of keep an eye on it so once this gets back to a boil that's when i'll start my timer for the actual processing period so let's go clean up the kitchen for a minute all right let me check our pot oh we're boiling check this out a little steamy so our water is back to a full boil which means now we can set the timer for this jam we're going to process it for 10 minutes but that's if you're at sea level so since i am at a higher altitude i'm going to add an additional one minute for every additional thousand feet of elevation so i'm at about close to if i round up six 000 feet so i'm going to process my jam for about 16 minutes all right and now your job is pretty much done for the next little bit keep an eye on it just to make sure nothing crazy happens but other than that you're hands off okay now comes the moment of truth we get to listen for the magical sound of the lids ceiling i just want to very carefully pull these out i just pour off any water that might be sitting on top and then transfer them right over to my towel and as these cool we'll hear that little popping sound which may just be the best sound ever [Music] if you see some foamy stuff in your jam that's totally okay don't freak out um you can skim foam off before you put it into the jars sometimes i forget like today and it's okay it won't hurt anything now we're just gonna let these guys cool for a couple hours and then we can check the seal and make sure everything is as it should be so i like to leave anything i can pretty much on my countertop for 24 hours for two reasons first off i want to make sure that i give everything a chance to seal and i don't want to disturb anything or get too over anxious and the second reason is i just kind of like to look at the fruits of my labor and admire it before it goes in the pantry and then when it is finally ready to go in the pantry it's cooled down we've checked the seals we've made sure they're tight i like to remove the rings from the jars and sometimes there's a little controversy around this some people do it some people don't but i just feel a little bit better when i stick these on the shelf then i know for sure that there are no false seals or anything weird happening it also helps to prevent the stickage around the ring to get mold growing on it or things like that so just my little pet peeve there but do it if you'd like

Channel: Jill Winger - Old Fashioned on Purpose

Views: 191,044

Rating: 4.9375339 out of 5

Keywords: jam recipe, make jam without sugar, no sugar jam, honey jam, jam with honey, how to make homemade jam, from-scratch jam, how to make jam, strawberry rhubarb jam recipe, how to can jam, water bath canning, canning tutorial, prairie homestead, homestead cooking, modern homesteading, the prairie homestead, strawberry jam recipe, strawberry jam, homemade jam, how to can, homemade jam recipe

Id: Z2SBgJJeKRA

Length: 21min 29sec (1289 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020