People frequently ask me why their jams don't set. After putting fruit up in jars every year for roughly a quarter of a century, I've developed a few basic rules for good jam.
Generally speaking, the key to getting jams to “set” is to cook fruits that are naturally high in pectin (with the appropriate amount of sugar) to 220F. That’s quite a bit higher than the boiling point and the concentrated nature of fruit puree or juice saturated with all that sugar is what makes the higher temperature possible. If you pick the fruit too ripe, it won’t have much pectin; as the fruits ripen and soften over time, the pectin gets converted into sugar. For proper gelling and flavor, you also need a certain amount of acid in the fruit; it should taste decidedly tart before the sugar is added. So start with fruit that’s firm and slightly under ripe, bring it to a boil, then add the sugar and, as quickly as you can without burning it, bring it up to temp. Be sure to work in small batches. A big pot of fruit will never come up to temp before it takes on an overcooked taste. Bring up to the jelling point before it evaporates or burns. To gauge the temperature, use a candy thermometer, or watch how the jam rolls off the back a of a metal spoon. When it’s under done, the jam will roll off in two distinct streams; when it’s ready the streams will come together to from a “sheet.” To sum it up:
1.) Use firm, barely ripe fruit and add lemon juice if the flavor is flat.
2.) Bring a small batch (no more than 4 cups) of fruit to a full boil.
3.) Add an appropriate amount of sugar; equal to the weight of the fruit.
4.) Quickly bring the temperature up to 220F; at this temp, the fruit will form a sheet as it falls off the back of a spoon.
5.) Put the jam up immediately in sterilized jars. (Four cups of fruit will yield about six cups of jam.)
“Standing over her stove in a sweltering-hot July kitchen, my grandmother, surrounded by buckets of fruit and dozens and dozens of empty glass jars, stirred cauldrons of chopped fruit for jam and simmered huge kettles of fruit to serve whole,” recalls Californian, Georgeanne Brennan in The Glass Pantry (Chronicle 1994). Such scenes are part of the collective American unconscious. My own family had its star preserver in the form of my Great Aunt Millie. Late in life, she and my Great Uncle John settled into a house by a lake, and in between the house and Uncle John’s chair by the lake, stood a series of make shift sheds. Inside one of the sheds, they stored furniture and various objects from their old home that never found a spot in the lake house. Inside another was my Uncle John’s boating gear, his lawnmower, and wheelbarrow. In the third was Aunt Millie’s larder. A testament to her hard work, the larder was a somber temple of home economy. Oddly shaped bottles and jars filled with things from the garden shone like stained glass windows in the dim light reflected off the lake. Oddly shaped because, against advice found in all the books I’ve ever seen on home canning, Aunt Millie used only recycled jars. Of course no one used the word "recycled" then, they just called them old. “I just use old mayonnaise and pickle jars,” she once said. “I can’t see puttin’ out good money for fancy canning jars and throwin’ these away.” She took no uncertain pride in “making do,” and “getting by on next to nothing.” Sometimes I imagine that what I saw in Aunt Millie’s larder was the passing of an era. Home canning, once a vital part of homemaking had been reduced to a craft practiced only by a few odd souls living on the edges of modern towns and cities. Once many tons of produce went into jars to insure that winter tables would be brightened with some of summer’s bounty, now only a trickle of produce gets into jars. The older adults who had to perform the daunting task of processing those jars, were probably happy to see the old era end. For them the very words canning and preserving conjure images of hard labor. Our parents’ generation, liberated by modern supermarkets swore they’d never go the way their grandmother’s went. Canning might have died. Instead, it has been romanticized into a treasured handicraft, widely practiced, but in a whole new way. “After my grandmother’s death,” writes Brennan “The only canning I witnessed was my mother’s yearly half-dozen jars of clove-pierced pickled peaches.” So the days of serious canning were over; but for a new generation of homemakers, the age of leisure canning had just begun. Most people who practice home preserving today put up only small amounts of food from their backyard gardens and local farmer’s markets largely out of nostalgia and a lingering hunger for the taste for homemade pickles and preserves. As for me, I never got a hold of Aunt Millie’s recipes for pickles and jams, but I think of her every time I wash out a jar to be used for pickling or canning. Surrounded by an almost incredible abundance of fresh produce as we often are, I suppose it is only natural that West Coast cooks would feel compelled to put some of that bounty into jars to preserve it.
Excerpted from West Coast Cooking (Sasquatch 2006)
Cooking with Northwest Cherries It’s hard to imagine anything better than a bowl of fresh ripe Northwest cherries served with nothing more than a few drops of the water in which they were rinsed with one or two of their own bright green leaves for a garnish. Served alone, cherries are one of nature’s perfect foods. But once you start combining cherries with other great ingredients in your own kitchen, you’ll uncover a whole series of intense and magical flavors that may not have been immediately apparent.
Cherries not only taste great by themselves, they bring out the natural goodness in other foods, hot or cold and when they rub shoulders with sweet and savory foods we already love, they taste even better.
Northwest cherries, like most stone fruits, provide a well-rounded flavor with enough acid to balance their natural sweetness. So they can be served with savory dishes as well as sweet ones: * Toss pitted cherries in salads, just as you would pieces of tart apple. * Sizzle cherries in the pan-juices of quick sautés of chicken or pork. * Toss cherries into an impromptu salsa to pair with grilled steak or fish. * Try a fresh or frozen Northwest cherry as a cocktail garnish.
And don’t neglect Northwest Cherries’ potential in the pastry kitchen: * Cherries freeze beautifully and frozen, they become a quick sorbet. * Baked into a tart, bold dark cherries assume a more refined character. * Dark cherries will form a rich layer between cake and crumb topping. * Pitted and left in whole rounds, they become the ideal topping for cake.
Organic Ingredients Move From Fringes to Mainstream
Years ago, when I was cooking at a small French restaurant in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, I started using local and organic ingredients because they were the best ingredients I could find on the island.
Product delivered from the mainland was not always in the best shape, and since deliveries came only once a week, I was hard pressed to keep my kitchen stocked with premium produce and seafood. So I turned to local suppliers. Even though I had to deal with a dozen individual suppliers instead of a single distributor, it was worth it. And eventually, I came to realize that the relationships I was establishing with farmers, fishermen and wild crafters had become the foundation of a new kind of cooking.
I was only dimly aware at the time that hundreds if not thousands of other chefs were doing the same thing in small towns and big cities all over the country. These days, organic, or otherwise sustainable ingredients comprise the foundation of most fine dining menus, at least in the most interesting places, and more and more, organic and local have become the rule instead of an exception.
Recently, when I was researching this topic for a story about Maria Hines and her restaurant, Tilth, the first certified organic restaurant in Seattle, it occurred to me that the iconoclastic chefs like me who broke away from mainstream distributors to find better ingredients had become the new icons. Dishes we forged during that era paved the way for New American Cuisine.
These days, new innovative techniques, combined with those local, sustainable ingredients which have become increasingly accessible to chefs, are generating better food than ever.
Watch for an upcoming article on this subject in Pacific Northwest, the Sunday newsmagazine of The Seattle Times that features a recipe from James Beard Award winning chef Maria Hines of Seattle’s Tilth restaurant.
In an essay called “A Plea for Culinary Modernism,” published in a journal called Gastronomica, the food historian Rachael Lauden points out that processed foods have been with us for at least as long as the written word and probably longer. She compares the demand that we stay away from processed foods to the demands of the Luddites, English handworkers who protested woolen mills in the eighteenth century because the factories would undo their traditional way of life.
The modern credo takes it for granted that fresh, whole and natural are good, while preserved, processed and treated foods are bad. But this is a pretty new idea, and one that upon close examination doesn't make good sense. To our grandparents and thousands of generations of our ancestors before them, fresh whole and natural meant dirty, unrefined and labor-intensive. As long ago as the second century BC, a Chinese philosopher sated that the most important foods were rice, salt, vinegar, soy sauce, oil and black tea. Four of these foods are highly processed, barely recognizable as products based on distilled and fermented grains and pulses, the fat pressed from the seeds of the plant in the mustard family and the oxidized and pressed leaves of a camellia bush.
In the Mediterranean, people deliberately fermented dairy products and pressed the oil from olives, salted their fish and transformed juices into wines because these foods were more stable, more easily digested and involved less work in the home. In pre-Columbian times, Meso-Americans bred their grain to the point where it could not reproduce without human assistance and they processed their corn with alkali to make it easier to cook and incidentally more nourishing. In fact, every culture on earth has enthusiastically embraced food processing with the same glee that the earliest humans embraced cooking because most forms of processing food result in a product that is in some way more nourishing and or more delicious than food in its natural state.
In short, I’m all for processed foods, but I want the foods themselves to be chemical free and humanely raised and I want the processing they undergo to be conducted in a way that does not damage the world in which I live. Frankly, I am very glad we live in a modern industrialized world where I have easy access to the rich and culturally diverse array of processed foods I enjoy every day like rice noodles to make my favorite pad Thai, or pre-made tortillas and cheese to make a quick burrito dinner for my family, not to mention simple pantry staples like processed olive oil and vinegar to make a quick salad dressing for greens from my own garden.
Dead Head Pad Thai Before he settled down and became a stock broker and financial planner, my wife’s cousin Bob, who stood up for me as a groom’s man at our wedding, worked at various odd and colorful jobs. For years, he was housepainter. And for a while, during the early 1980’s, he used to follow The Grateful Dead concert tours pulling a trailer equipped with a rudimentary kitchen. In the trailer, he made and sold Pad Thai noodles which he served with Bob’s Hot Habañero Shake. Bob’s noodles were my introduction to the phenomenon that is Thai Food. I never got his recipe, but, after years of carefully dissecting the dish and studying other recipes, I have finally developed a recipe that comes close. I decided to forgo the habañero shake in favor of a few crushed red chilies.
Crispy Bean and Cheese Burritos Cooking my way through college as a dinner cook at a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Bellingham, Washington, I became something of an authority on burritos. The burritos we served were not “soft;” instead, they were fried in oil until they were crisp. The frying took place either on top of the griddle or in a shallow pan of oil (depending on which of us cooks was in charge that night), and instead of simply turning the burritos over once too fry the second side, we developed a technique for rolling the filled burritos as they fried so that they took on a three-sided log shape, something like the famous Toblerone chocolate bars. A quarter century later, the restaurant, which is still in operation under new owners has long abandoned the three-sided burrito, but I still follow the procedure when I make burritos at home. Serve the burritos hot on a bed of shredded lettuce with homemade salsa and sour cream passed separately.
Chile and Tomato Salsa Salsa made in big, commercial batches is usually composed of vegetables that have been smashed as well as chopped. What distinguishes a really fine salsa from an ordinary one is the care that's taken in how the vegetables are cut. Use your sharpest knife and take your time to make fine dice that burst with flavor in every bite.
Mixed Green Salad In the last quarter of the twentieth century when young cooks first started localizing elements of country French cooking, finding good salad greens presented an almost insurmountable hurdle. These days, the mixed baby greens known as mesclun are available ready-to-eat in most supermarkets, making what was once a labor of love into an easy-to-prepare element of any weeknight dinner. This French-American Salad may be the quintessential accompaniment to a casual entrée.
