20 May 2026

Syrup

20 May 2026 10:43 pm
igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
The elderflower jam was a pretty much complete failure. You are supposed to boil it cautiously for five minutes until it 'thickens': http://www.jam-making.com/jam_elderflower.html
I boiled mine with increasing alarm for forty minutes until I had to go out, returning several hours later (which meant I had to sterilise the jars all over *again*) to boil it furiously for another twenty minutes of frustration, at which point it did finally start to wrinkle when pushed on a chilled saucer, so I thought I'd better pot it up in order to avoid a repeat of the crab-apple boiled sweet episode. However the half-full jar even when stone cold is still not set; it has thickened into a caramel-coloured gloopy liquid but is nowhere near being jelly. So what I basically have is four sealed jars of what amounts to runny and very expensive golden syrup; I can only conclude that my attempts at extracting the pectin from the lemon pips were entirely ineffectual, and that the amount of pectin in the jam sugar (over 1000g out of the 1,300g in total) was insufficient to set that volume of liquid, so that it only started to thicken at all after a significant quantity had been boiled off...

The same thing happened to my mother once with a batch of bramble jelly that simply failed to 'gel', but that was at least strongly blackberry-flavoured and we were able to use it as a topping for yoghurt etc. This is pretty much home-made golden syrup with a slight surviving floral tang -- but probably too liquid to even function as a golden syrup replacement in baking.

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igenlode: The pirate sloop 'Horizon' from "Treasures of the Indies" (Default)
Igenlode Wordsmith

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