Topic: Low sugar jam/Freezer jam

[pumkinlover]

Having tried some low sugar raspberry jam made by a friend I was amazed at the fruitiness of the taste.

Googling found a bit of confusion from people who wanted to know if you could make jam from frozen fruit, and lots of pop -ups asking me to agree to all my information being splashed across the internet (well at least they asked first!)

Eventually I did what my friend had done  - just under half the amount of sugar by weight to fruit-
and added some home made pectin from windfall apples- Thank you Ace.

It is lovely! I am keeping the jar in use in the fridge and the unopened in the freezer and advising recipients to do the same.

Unless making for raffle prizes/ gifts I will never use the normal 50/50 fruit to sugar recipe again

[BarriedaleNick]

I generally drop the sugar a bit these days - say 800g of sugar to a 1000g of fruit - the jam still lasts well - but haven't gone as low as 1:2 ratio!

[Yorkshire Lass]

Do you have recipe for raspberry freezer jam  please?

[pumkinlover]

My friend said she used the ratio 2 parts fruit to one part sugar, instead of the usual 1:1 ratio.
Sorry can't be more specific.
A bit more googling found a forum post- might even been on here- that small quantities of jam are easier to get to set than large.

[jennym]

I used to make a lot of jam. But it had to be legal, I was selling it.

I remember patiently explaining to people why a certain amount sugar is essential to preserve the jam, and  ensure food safety. If you don't want to use sweeteners and preservatives, or have a very short shelf life,  you have to have a minimum sugar content of 60% in the finished product.

But people think only of  white sugar out of a packet i.e. sucrose. There's no doubt in my mind that it does the job well.

One way of avoiding adding the full amount of added refined sugar, is to increase the amount of fruit sugars within the jam mix. Dead easy if you have a glut of any fruit.

A bit of arithmetic helps here.

For best results to measure the sugar content get a refractometer specifically for jam, 40-90 roughly on the Brix scale. You have to read it at 20 deg centigrade.

Start with your fruit, weigh it. Weigh your water. Weigh your saucepan.
Say you have 1000g of raspberries. There's about 10% "natural" sugar in them. And about 80% water.
Anyhow, you probably have about 100g of sugar to start with in the fruit. Add 50g of water and cook it, just as it is. Microwave is ok for this but you need a big bowl, and don't forget to weigh the bowl.
Cook the lot down slowly without sugar until its really thick. Weigh the lot. Deduct the pan or bowl weight.
If you end up with 335g you've got 335g of cooked fruit STILL with 100g of sugar in it =  30%.

You'd need to add about 200g of sugar, giving a weight of 535g. (If you go back to looking at your starting weight of 1000g of raspberries, you will think you are adding just 1/5 of that weight in sugar)
By the time you've cooked it and lost some more water, assuming the total weight is about 500g  the total sugar content will STILL be 300g and at the 60% mark.

But it's unrealistic to expect folk to mess about doing all these calculations at home.
Fruit varies in sugar and water content over different years, let alone different fruits.

The key point you might want to take away from this info is that by cooking the fruit well down to a much thicker consistency-  and to about a third of its starting weight - you can reduce the refined sugar that you add drastically, and the taste is out of this world.

Jen

[pumkinlover]

Thank you for your post.
It was a clearer explanation of my vague thought process about the sugar/ water ratio.
I have also started to use unbleached (organic) sugar for the jam with no obvious detrimental effect.

At present I don't sell jam but do offer it as a raffle prize at a couple of groups I go to, not sure of the legal status of raffle prize. However for now I will make the usual 50:50 ratio of the starting ingredients.