apple-maple jam

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

As I mentioned in my last market report, I bought twenty pounds of apples last month.  I’m still working my way through them as fresh apples or baked in crisps, but part of the reason I got so many was to preserve some of them.  On Sunday, I turned nine of them into apple-maple jam. 

Apple-Maple Jam

9 medium apples, chopped (3-4qts)
2.5 c turbinado sugar
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t allspice
1/2 t nutmeg
1 c maple syrup

This made 4 1/4 pints of very thick jam.

I cooked the apples, sugar, and spices until the apples were soft (adding them gradually, as they squished enough to fit more in the 3qt pot), then pureed them, added the maple syrup, and then canned the result in a boiling water bath.  The sugar, I think, is only important if you want to have chunks of apple suspended in jelly--I didn’t peel the apples, and I wanted a spreadable jam, so I could probably have left it out.  (If you do want apples in jelly, you may well want something closer to the 6 c of sugar called for in the original recipe.) Alas, the only local ingredients in my jam were the apples themselves, but you could easily use local syrup, skip the sugar, and get only your spices from far away.