DIY GOURMET: Taste the Fruit of Your Labors Long Past Summer

I was in a real jam. It was peach.

It was the height of summer a few years ago. The solstice had long gone and the early August light was already resorting to that faintly golden tint, the trademark of places north of 38 degrees latitude. I say the light was “resorting” to that amber prism from the south, because those of us who’ve been here long enough know that we get nine months of winter, a week of autumn and spring, and summer eeks out what it can from the rest of the calendar.

But when the Colorado Front Range Summer is on, it’s on in a glorious way that makes up for the relative brevity. August days are brilliantly hot. The nights surprisingly cool. And they bring the first chirps of crickets, the first serious dread of the looming start of school, and the world’s best peaches.

Sure, Georgia markets its claim that it produces the best peaches in the world. But here in Colorado, we know better. And we don’t tell anyone about the magic on the Western Slope that turns sun, water and air into softballs of slightly tart, fragrant softballs of slurpy syrup and fuzz.

It was a triple play for me that year. A friend driving from Utah delivered a surprise box of Palisade’s finest. My wife bought a box from a stand melting on the August pavement of a vacant gas station, a sight that appears like a mirage around town every summer. And my neighbor’s tree, in an spectacle it had never attempted before, showered us with smaller but sweeter marvels in an attempt to show off.

Peach profusion.

We decided to make jam. Because nothing allows you to capture the flavor of summer sun, sumptuous fruit and even the smell of a scorching summer day like a homemade jar of jam, jelly or preserves. It’s magic. On winter’s nastiest day, one bite of summer’s fruit preserves magically breaks even the coldest spell.

And it’s really very easy to do. Now you can watch hundreds of jam and jelly videos, pour over new and old cookbooks, ring up the home ec folks at your old school, but I can tell you all you really need to know in a few easy rules.

Rule No. 1: All cooking is nothing more than chemistry, and making jams and jellies is that science elevated to an art form. The tightly controlled interaction of citric acid, sugar, pectin, water, heat, pulp and even air pressure are critical to success. Failure comes in many ways when making jelly, but none of them are necessarily a horrible thing. Jellies can be too thin, too thick, too sour, too sweet, too cooked or too raw, and still be stunningly wonderful creations. But the perfect jar of jam or jelly depends on paying excruciatingly close attention to just a few details, mostly accurate measure.

Rule No. 2: Marginal or crappy fruit makes marginal or crappy jellies and preserves. If you just love your Welch’s Grape Jelly and wonder what all the fuss is about when it comes to expensive commercial and handmade conserves, just flip the page. But if you practically get goosebumps firing the synapse in your brain holding the smell, the taste, the texture, the deep burgundy glow of your gramma’s homemade chokecherry jelly, you can’t violate Rule No. 2.

Experts agree, the fruit has to be just barely ripe, never overripe, never bruised, never second rate — ugly and misshapen is cool, though — because that’s the kind of jams and jellies you get.

Rule No. 3: Have patience. You’ll need it. While making kick-butt jams and such isn’t a particularly difficult proposition, and the actual jelling goes pretty fast, it’s tedious and involves a lot of steps.

If the process starts with picking fruit in the hot sun, you can just imagine. Cherries have to be washed and pitted twice — once to remove the pits, one cherry at a time, and the second time to make sure you didn’t miss one, which is a perfect invitation for a broken tooth. Strawberries have to be hulled, never sliced. Blueberries have to be individually stemmed. Apples cored. Peaches pealed and pitted. You get the picture. Each piece of fruit gets inspected and prepped. We’re talking about 6 cups of prepared fruit here. It’s a lot of cherries or blueberries. It’s not hard, but it requires patience.

Rule No. 4: You must pay very close attention to cleaning and sterilization so you don’t ruin the fruits of your labor and make someone sick. Actually, the danger in home canning is pretty minimal when it comes to jams and jellies because they’re so acidic and sugared that they really preserve themselves. There’s little danger of botulism or other serious home-canning maladies borne from improperly preserved jellies, like there is with canning some vegetables, sauces and meats. Still, sterilized jars, seals and utensils and proper canning technique means you won’t have a dozen jars of moldy jam at Christmas when you’re ready to give them away.

That’s it. Four rules to success.

But there are a couple of caveats, too. Here’s where the chemistry comes in. It isn’t magic that turns raw ingredients into that perfectly sweet, silky and thick concoctions. It’s the chemistry of heat, water, sugar, acid and a substance called “pectin” which comes from the cell walls of just about every fruit, some more, some less. Some much less.

The acid, sugar and pectin are what give jams and jellies their unique consistency. It’s not a naturally occurring substance. If the sugar-acid balance is wrong, the jam will be either too thin, like pancake syrup, or this caramelized goo, almost like heavy gelatin or even taffy.

The sure-fire way to prevent having ruined your day and a lot of money, time and effort, is to follow the directions implicitly. If the recipe calls for exactly 5 cups of cut-up fruit, it must be exact. If the recipe calls for boiling the concoction for 1 minute, don’t let it go past.

One of the most confusing aspects of cooking jellies is the command to start timing the cooking when the mixture comes to a boil that cannot be stirred down. Don’t panic as you’re stirring and boiling and wondering if you’re stirring the boil down or mixing air into the jam. Stir slowly and evenly, and after it starts boiling for a few seconds, you’ll be confident about when to start timing.

Everything else is straightforward, except this one thing: pectin.

This cell-based starchy fiber is so prevalent in apples, that you really don’t need to add commercial pectin in unpeeled apple jelly, but follow the directions inside the pectin box anyway. Pectin is a natural substance, and you can make it yourself by boiling down a big pan of apples. Certo made a fortune selling their liquid version. The reason to use it is because it allows you to not have to cook your jams and jellies for nearly as long as trying to cook it to the right “jelling” temperature. Now that’s tough stuff. It’s a different temperature at every elevation, and different fruits don’t behave identically at the same temperature. Cooking jams longer without pectin diminishes the bright fruit flavor, some color and most of the cool characteristics of chunky fruit in preserves. Most importantly, it makes a relatively easy kitchen enterprise an endeavor fit only for seasoned experts.

Just use it. Directions inside the box tell you how much sugar, pectin, water, fruit, juice and lemon juice to use for just about any kind of fruit, to make either preserves, which has whole fruit, or jelly, which is clear, strained fruit juice, or jam, which is smashed, pureed fruit.

The directions can be slightly confusing since pectin companies essentially have a recipe for every type of jam, jelly and preserves imaginable on a little strip of paper. If it’s just overwhelming, try surfing to the CSU Cooperative Extension page on making jams and jellies https://ow.ly/zoIL301Bcxp, which includes information about making jarred treats without added pectin.

And that’s the jam I was in a few years ago. I’d been making peach jams with added pectin for years. For the first few months after canning, it was like taking a ripe peach right off the tree every time we opened a jar. But the jam eventually lost that “just picked” or “just made” quality, that makes it shimmer on hot buttered toast. Too much pectin, a friend advised.

The peaches I had this time were on the ripe side, and if you do decide to try and forgo the pectin box, you need about one part underripe fruit for three parts ripe to pull it off.

Throwing out all the advice I’m giving you here, I added only half a box of pectin and some extra lemon juice to boost the acid and cooked away.

For my bravado, I got 12 stunning jars of something between overcooked pancake syrup and undercooked jam. When it lived in the fridge, it was OK. On a warm summer morning, it was almost pourable.

It’s not rocket science, just serious food science. Without being able to test levels for acidity, sugar, water and pectin, it’s a crap shoot, and I crapped out in peaches.

Follow the directions. Gamble in Central City. Enjoy the best of Colorado summer year ‘round by putting up a few jars of your own memories.