Thank you! That was exactly my thinking when I decided to go for it. Our homegrown bananas are small. By the time I smushed/mashed it up good and added it to the berries, there are only tiny bits of bananas suspended in the jam. I didn't make an all-strawberry jam with the bananas...the berries are mixed...dewberries, blackberries, and strawberries. I used commercially bottled lemon juice. I was actually surprised by the wonderful flavor of this jam. I caught my husband eating the partial jar of leftover jam that didn't make it into the canner. He was eating it like dessert! Nothing like cleaning out the freezer getting ready for spring! I also made a batch of berry-pineapple jam. I had an 8 oz jar of pineapple, leftover from some recipe that didn't use the entire can. I used another Certo recipe for this one---Strawberry pineapple jam, but it was the same mix of strawberries, dewberries and blackberries that I'd deseeded through my Roma Sauce Maker. Tastes pretty darn good, but not as good as the Berry-Banana. I also added a teaspoon of vanilla to each batch of jam. That's my homemade vanilla, with 100 proof vodka and organic vanilla beans. Good stuff. Appreciate the feedback! Jill

Thank you for the advice and reassurance :) I tried it last night ... turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself! It is one of my first jams so I was fairly happy that it worked. I made 8 cups of fruit, and only used 1 package of pectin (which is only half what they recommend) but I figured that plums are a high-pectin fruit apparently and can be used without any pectin ... so I only put enough for the cherries. It "set" really well so I guess that was ok. I used basically the recipe I posted above except only 2 cups of sugar. It is certainly sweet enough like that but I was just worried because the sugar is meant to be the preservative, and I wanted there to be enough to be safe to store. If I used 2 cups of sugar with no-sugar-needed pectin and 8 cups of fruit, how long will it last on a shelf? Regular Jams usually seems to last a couple years, would this reduced-sugar option be less? I used allspice which was really nice with the plums and cherries. Tastes more like a fall jam than a summer one but that's ok ... it will keep till then. Next time I will try vanilla, that sounds incredible too!! Liqueurs are a great idea too, I hadn't even though of that aside from the Red Wine that was in one recipe I found. Thanks! I only had ground allspice but I understand what you mean about the cloudy jam ... mine doesn't seem to be (yet) but I will definitely keep that in mind and look for whole spices that can be removed :) So if I was going to use Sugar instead of Fruit Juice, would I just substitute it 1:1 Cup? The cherries seemed to be juicy enough without much added liquid so I don't think I'd need the juice for liquid. Next up (tonight hopefully) is Raspberry - Lemon Jam. Again, high pectin fruits so will try using 8 cups of fruit and only 1 pkg of no-sugar-needed pectin with 2 cups of sugar. Raspberries are pretty juicy too, I think.

I bought her book but haven't looked seriously at it barring the introduction and the oven method. I see the risk of the oven method with full-sugar traditional preserves as one of jar breakage, not safety. Jams are inherently safe; processing is meant to extend shelf life and prevent mold, not because they're prone to risky forms of spoilage. The exceptions would be such low-acid fruits as figs, mangoes and cantaloupe. And while there is risk with those if the levels of added acid are insufficient, I'm guessing it's quite low because to set a preserve you have to cook to about 68% sugar; at that level any remaining water is pretty well bound up by the sugar, which discourages the growth of micro-organisms. In the case of peaches and cherries, I see no risk unless a preserver is really really determined to make peach-cherry slop. Both fruits are naturally low in pectin at the firm-ripe level. At its optimum this will be a loosely set preserve. With dead-ripe fruit it won't set; you could firm it up by cooking it to death, essentially boiling out the water and evaporating into a viscous taffy, but it wouldn't be a gel. So purely hypothetically if you used dead-ripe windfall fruit (i.e. bruised - which also raises pH) you might have a risk, but it would be miniscule. If it disturbs your comfort level, though, you could always add a pinch or two of powdered citric acid, ascorbic acid (which would assist in preservation of the light color), or some of the acid blend wineshops sell. That wouldn't change the liquid ratio and could also be beneficial to cut some of the sweetness. The best resource I know of to explore issues of pH and the properties of preserves of all types is The Jamlady Cookbook. She has a scientific bent and tells you everything the layperson might want to know about the art of jam-making. Carol

I don't remember the name of the pectin I used, but it is NOT Smucker's. I still have the Smucker's in my pantry and checked their recipe and it's different. All I remember, is that it was a name brand. I'll buy some more pectin this weekend in case I find some fruit on sale. All the pectin's are in the same place in a grocery store. Just go to a big store so they'll have more than one brand. The Smucker's box says "Fruit Pectin - no sugar needed" and the brand I used said about the same thing. Hope you have fun like I did. Monica