Crops

[igenlode]

The towel-tomatoes are now fruiting heavily, and I am trying to harvest them regularly before the fruits plunge to their doom! I must remember that I need to keep back the seed from at least one tomato this year in order to provide a 'towel' for next year's plants; I am extremely pleased with this year's results, where the plants have flowered prolifically, set quantities of fruit, and produced tomatoes of a very good flavour about an inch and a half in diameter :-)

I think the towel-tomatoes, sensible plants that they are, have more or less finished flowering now and are concentrating on filling out their existing fruit -- the heritage tomatoes have begun to change colour but have yet to produce a single ripe 'cherry' tomato. They are still heading skywards and I had to stake them last week (pulling up the stick from one of the towel-tomato pots which really wasn't using it, as those plants are busy rambling all over one another and the surrounding pots at only about 12 inches high!) They are still flowering and not setting particularly well.



I bought a job lot of reduced strawberries at the market and made about 8lb of jam, using some ancient pectin I found in the back of the cupboard. (The powder had hardened into a solid block, but still apparently worked.) Due to my inexperience the fruit rose horribly -- not too apparent in the 'crushed strawberry jam' recipe, but very evident in the batch where the whole fruit were simmered gently in syrup!

I was surprised to discover when I was up in the loft looking for empty jars that I apparently made plum jam last year -- I had no memory of having done that at all! (And I evidently didn't eat it...)

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

How did the jam taste?

[igenlode]

The jars are all sealed up, but the bits I scraped off the saucepan were very tasty ;-)

[watervole]

If you use whole fruit, my husband says they'll always float - he's the jam-maker in our family.

[igenlode]

I opened the first jar last night (I'd poured the wax on the top far too thick, and couldn't break it -- I just ended up pushing it down into the bottom of the pot so that I could get at the jam!) and was a bit disconcerted to find that, although I'd tested it for setting, and in fact the top had set so firmly in the pan that I couldn't get the scum off the fruit before potting it up, the bottom of the jar, which had no fruit in it, didn't appear to have set after all.

The pot of jam turned out to be just whole fruit in thick syrup, Russian-fashion. Very tasty, but since I'd gone to the trouble of adding pectin and testing it to see if it had been boiled long enough, I was a bit taken aback!

[watervole]

Strawberry needs more pectin than other fruit.

Were you using a jam thermometer?

Were you stirring it regularly? Jam needs to be stirred a lot while cooking.

[igenlode]

That was the batch with the added pectin 'without sugar'. I don't have a jam thermometer; I just did the practical 'set test' (put it on a cold plate and it wrinkles). And as I said, the top surface had set hard even before I potted it up.

Lack of stirring, on the other hand, sounds very likely to explain the observed phenomenon! I didn't stir that batch at all after the first adding of the pectin, as I was worried about the pre-simmered fruit disintegrating. And of course it was the top surface of the liquid that I was testing to see if it would set...
I shan't attempt to do whole fruit jam again; it isn't particularly useful on bread and butter or in cakes (or for anything other than putting on a teaspoon and sipping tea through, as the Russians did!) and it is much more fragile to make. I only did it because that happened to be the recipe that was on the back of the random pectin sachet :-D