Jamming

This time of year used to be the time I started thinking about cooking jam and chutney from the fruit my peach and apricot tree delivers. It's been a tradition I've kept up over the past decade. Now jam and chutney has a lot of sugar in it and I even before I cut sugar out of my life, I never managed to eat all the jam I cooked anyway. However, the idea of jam and chutney is to save fruit for later. In modern times, we can access almost any type of fruit throughout the year. So preserving some fruit from a period of bountiful excess is the main reason for making preserves. I've been thinking about the whole preserving thing, even dried fruit of course has it's origins in the concept of preserving some of the goodness for later.

I've tested out the principle of jam without sugar with strawberries and it works well actually. As strawberries are in season now, we bought two large punnets this past weekend, but as strawberries spoil easily, and we only eat about 3 berries a day each, I thought this would make a good experiment.

Homemade Sugar Free Strawberry Jam Experiment

about 1 kg of strawberries, leaves removed, roughly chopped into halves
a splash of water
lemon juice (about half a lemon)
2 tablespoons of xylitol to counter the lemon juice mostly
a pinch or two of Xantam Gum for thickening
a pinch of salt

On a low heat I got the strawberries boiling and let it slowly cook for about 40 minutes, stirring and mashing the strawberries towards the end to breakdown some of the big ones. You can also make it a smooth jam by using a hand blender. I opted for a chunkier version as I intend to use it on our yoghurt instead of fresh fruit. Towards the end I added a pinch of the thickener to make sure it sets a little bit.

One hour later, I had my jam. Not super sweet, slightly tangy on the tongue - which I really like.

It is also great for making ice cream. Natural colouring and flavour for your Banting ice cream.