Hi All! Not sure if anyone is still out there connected to this thread, but thought I would try. =) My family loves the good old Strawberry Rhubarb freezer jam that uses jello, I love it, too. My problem is, I try to make enough of it to last us all year (they love it that much!), but I dont' want to use that much freezer space. I have tried a couple of recipes this year, water bath recipes, that have not set up. One I was afraid may not have had the right ingredients to be a jar jam, since it didn't set up, so after a few hours, I threw it in the fridge to use as syrup. Low and behold it set. =) So, I found another and tried it. It didn't set either. (What is the longest it should take to set up?) 12 c rhubarb 3 Tbs pectin (powdered) 3 c sugar lime juice cubes (2 or 3?) dash red food color Put sugar on diced rhubarb and let it sit overnight to suck water out. Cooked and reduced it for about 15 miutes with lime juice, and added pectin near end. My recipe is homemade so your mileage may vary. Rhubarb is high acid, though, so it should be safe enough. >>> I like the look of the above recipe very much (it is from further up in this thread), it has very little sugar, doesn't require much in the way of other fruit (I'm trying to be as frugal as possible) and is said to set up. My question is this. Can I use one of my recipes that has not set up, just add commercial pectin to it? (I do like the flavor, just want it to set.) If so, how do I figure out how much pectin to add? I'm new to the jam canning process, and don't have much for local resouces, so I appreciate all the help I can get. Thanks! Gabi

If your using regular pectin, its crital to have te exact amount of liquid and sugar. A good meaurin cup, or an accurate weight scale can be a help. Also, f pectin is used, check its expiration date. Most only have a couple of years of life. Once older you would probably need triple the amount of old pectin to get a set. I like the cold dish test. Take a small dish or plate, place in the freezer a couple of minutes. Pour a small spoonful onto the cold and back ito the freezer a minute. Take it out and see if its jelly yet. If not, you gotta work fast, either add more sugar or pectin, boil a minute and retest. If you don't get it in three tries, consider it a sauce or syrup. Citus based jellies and jams take up to a month or two to set fully.

Natural pectin content in fruits varies greatly. Even tomatoes have pectin in them. Unless a lot of boiling and sugar is added to help natural pectin to set, its difficult for a person just starting out to make a successful jelly or jam with no added pectin. Some don't use any added pectin, but because diabetics must watch sugar intake its not a good idea to attempt it unless you have a lot of experience. Simply boiling down apple cider to at least 1/20 of its original volume will give a syrup and possible set. Adding things like peels, seeds, septa, and any hulls that surround seed cavities can help improve a natural set. Things like pepper jelly and others with very low amounts of natural pectin will simply boil down to syrup, or scorch badly before reaching any kind of set. Many people here have just strated out trting to make a home canned food. If they follow someones very old recipe and find it to be a failure, the person may not want to try a failure again. Pectin concentrates are quite common in the US and for most fist time jelly makers its a good idea to follow a recipe exactly before attemptng to set a jelly that has no added pectin and is also low in sugar. A BWB IS necessary no matter what place on earth you live on. The UK may not think its necessary, and is perfectly safe to can without any BWB, but thats simply giving dangerous and unpredictable safety to home canned products. I push the envelope some when using a steam canner, but because the canner has a rapid recovery and most canned items are high in acid, I don't worry as much about contamination. I would NOT home can without knowing about an alternative process that is done by commercial companies, and if its possible to duplicate some of these processes. Again, all high acid foods, which, by themselves are safer to home can compared to a low acid food that requires a PC and very high over 212 degrees F heating.

As a long time canner who struggles to make the perfect batch, I can tell you that stuff floats because it ends up being less dense than the liquid it is floating in. The culprit is the water in the fruit. The "solution" that the fruit is floating in with jam is a high sugar to water ratio sauce, more dense than the waterey fruit. That is why one way to make "old fashioned" no pectin jams is to macerate the fruit overnight with sugar. This causes the fruit to exude water so you will have a less dense fruit in the morning and a yummy juicy slurry to cook down into jam. Another thing that I have seen happen is that fruit varies greatly in the amount of water it contains. Some batches of strawberry jam I have made (and the same can be said for peaches) end up being more watery than other batches because the strawberries are more watery. I've notice that with blueberries too. Sometimes there is a gradual evening out of the water balance between sugar sauce and fruit and the fruit sinks a little over time. BTW, it is not the end of the world to open up your jam and stir it up to redistribute the fruit. It is yummy any way you serve it up, the rest is the finer points of appearance, not taste or safety.