At some point while I was cooking for (around) Cale's food allergies, I crossed a threshold to another level of kitchen skills. Call it kitchinvincible. I had never before considered making my own crackers, but now that I've made some a couple of times, I know crackers are both easy to make and mindless munchingly good! The latest notch is jam and preserves.
I have a pin cherry tree in my back yard, leaning over the deck. I tend to avoid highly specialized tools, like a cherry pitter, except when those tools could get a lot of use. Having a cherry tree has been a good reason to have a cherry pitter. The first or second summer we lived here, I made two cherry pies from the output. The cherry pies tasted great, but I have to admit that my homemade cherry pie filling tasted just like commercial cans of cherry pie filling, at least as best as I can remember. The other six years, the squirrels or the birds have eaten the cherries before they were ripe enough for us to pick them. This year, I said squirrels in the tree should be shot on sight with the BB gun (which just hurts). It worked! I've already picked as many cherries this year as all previous years combined, and the tree needs more picking even just on the branches I can reach without a ladder. However, pin cherries aren't sweet ... or tart ... they're sour! So I needed a recipe with enough added sugar to make pin cherries palatable. Like jam.
I started with Ball Freezer Fruit Pectin. This pectin was, by far, the easiest to use. 4 cups of cherry purée, 1 1/2 cups sugar, and 1 package of Ball Freezer Fruit Pectin. Mix the purée with the sugar, let stand 5 minutes. Mix the pectin in that for 3 minutes. Pour into freezer containers, leaving 1/2-inch headroom, then pop in the freezer. So easy! The taste is fantastic! I wouldn't mess with such a good thing, except I had other pectin on the shelf already, and a lot more cherries.
The next one I tried was Sure-Jell Fruit Pectin. It did have a freezer recipe, but I didn't want to follow it because it called for 3/4 cup added boiling water (likely to crystallize in the freezer) and significantly more sugar. In fact, it called for 2 cups of sour cherries to 4 cups of sugar! Ouch! I could have a sugar crash just thinking about that. Since I knew what proportions tasted good, I ignored the recipe, even knowing that sugar is necessary for pectin to gel. Since I didn't want to dissolve the pectin in boiling water (didn't want to add water), I had to wing it. Let's be honest: I didn't follow the recipe at all, since I ignored the ingredients and the major ratios. I added the pectin to really hot sugared cherry purée. There was no reason for this recipe to work; although it was very slow to gel, it did set overnight in the refrigerator, and it tastes just as good! So I was able to ignore the recipe that came with this pectin, and just squeak by.
The last one I tried was Ball No Sugar Needed Fruit Pectin. The included freezer recipe called for dissolving the pectin in 1 3/4 cups hot apple juice before combining with 3 cups of cherry purée. Yeah, I followed the first recipe instead. (Now I'm out of sugar. I don't use it often, but then I go on a run like this cherry spree.) Again I mixed the pectin with hot, sugared purée. I could tell right away that it would set, probably because pectin does like sugar. Same good taste! (Sugar also maintains the bright color of fresh fruit.)
The final analysis on the different varieties of fruit pectin is that I had more flexibility in recipe selection than any of the included directions led me to believe (thankfully!). I prefer the taste of the lowest-sugar (but not sugar-free) recipe, so I made it with all three pectins. The Freezer Pectin was the easiest to use since I didn't have to heat the jam, so it also didn't froth up like the other two. The No Sugar pectin was the next easiest. The regular Fruit Pectin did work just fine, although I did worry about having to reprocess the jam to get it to set, and it did froth up the most. I could tell during the preparation that all three responded differently, but in the end, they all worked too. As expected, I can't taste a difference in pectin brands when pectin is the smallest ingredient. I'll have to make sure all of these are fully set before I decide if I can tell a difference in the final cherry jam textures.
