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Please, need an answer re. peach jam

17 years ago

Good morning, folks! All of you have inspired me to do some canning. That's a frightening thought!

Anyway, I made 6-1/2 pints of low sugar peach jam this morning. They are cooling as we speak and everyone bitty one has popped. All the fruit is at the top of the jar. Can I sort of rotate the jars once they start to cool to distribute fruit throughout the jar??

Thanks! Drool!

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Comments (3)

lindac
17 years ago
Yep....Turn them over before they completely set.
lpinkmountain
17 years ago
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.
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beachlily z9a
Original Author
17 years ago
Thank you, thank you! The jam looks great, and I was able to get some to mix. Lpink, I'm just that way. I know they will taste good, but I used the pectin method to significantly reduce the amount of sugar involved. We just prefer the taste of fruit, instead of overpowering sweet.

On that note, I'm going to continue the process for Hab. Gold. Figured that if I messed the kitchen up for one, I might as well do the other one too. That way, cleanup is easier. My DH amazed me after I made jam. He said that kitchens were made to be messed up. I didn't tell him I had already run one load of dishes and was starting a new one. The counters were cleaned as was the stove.

Oh, I'll have to report on the performance of my new induction range and its impact on the canning process.

Onward, forward!

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