If there’s a golden rule to making jam, it’s this: it’s best to turn fruit into jam as soon as possible. In this series, we’re looking at how to do just that. In part one, we looked at how to choose the best fruit for jam. Now let’s look at the tools and techniques that can help you turn lovely fruit into delicious jam.
The most important interfering device is a very wide low potentiometer, made of a thin layer of conductive metal. Most importantly, this will help you observe the golden rule of speed. The gold standard jam jar is made of copper.
Copper is great for making jam because it’s highly conductive and allows for very careful temperature control. It’s also super easy to clean. Occasionally you’ll hear concerns that traces of copper will leach from copper cookware into your food and cause metal poisoning. For a couple of reasons, this isn’t really a jam problem. First, jams don’t cook long enough to leach out large amounts of copper. Cooking or storing highly acidic foods with copper over a long period of time poses a higher risk. In addition, unless your diet is based on jam, any traces of copper in the final product will only enter your system in small and safe amounts. Cooking methods are also important.
When it comes to cooking jam, most fruits don’t need much processing. If you want a rustic, textured jam with big chunks of fruit in it, in most cases you can leave it alone. Berries – even strawberries – can be left whole. Apricots can be halved, pitted, and thrown into the pan without cutting. If your fruit is dirty or from a source that may have been sprayed and you need to rinse it, make sure you let it dry completely before proceeding; you’re trying to cook all the water out as quickly as possible, so you don’t want to start with more water than the fruit already contains.
However, some fruits can be hard or fibrous, so they need a little more processing. Even though they are little juice bombs that squirt water, they are a very sturdy fruit and if you put them in too big, they won’t fully break down. For these, I like to split the batch in half: half into quarters, the other half gently cooked, and then run through a food mill to make a soft base for the larger chunks. This method also works for rhubarb, hard cherries, figs, or any time you want a smoother consistency of jam.
One of my favorite jam-making techniques is to macerate the fruit first. Macerating is the process of coating the fruit with sugar and letting it sit for a few hours or overnight, which extracts some of the juice from the fruit and makes a syrup from the sugar. Unless my fruit is super juicy, I like to avoid putting dry sugar in the jam jars because the dry sugar can easily caramelize and burn at the bottom of the pan and ruin the batch. The softened fruit starts to break down and blend with the sugar, so your jam is on its way before you can heat it up.
Cooking Mixer Machine
Once the fruit/sugar mixture is in the pan, there are three basic stages of jamming: the initial heating and dissolving of any undissolved sugar; the quick frothing and bubbling stage; and the final cooking and finishing stage.
In the first stage, you only want to stir the jam well enough to prevent burning. If the sugar is still dry, the calories should be low, and if the sugar has completely dissolved, the calories should be medium-high. If the sugar is still dry, you will need to keep stirring until the juices run clear and the sugar has melted. Once all the sugar has melted, you should stir very little or not at all. The less you stir, the faster everything heats up and the more moisture will disappear.
Once the fruit mixture begins to boil, some of the fruit will produce scum that you should skim off. Generally, if there is scum on top that is dull in color and looks like sea foam, skim it off with a stainless steel spoon. This scum can make your jam look dull and can even trap dangerous bubbles in it after canning. At this point, the mixture will also bubble up quite high – I usually try not to fill jam jars more than a third full to allow room. Try to stir as little as possible at this point; if you’re worried about burning, it’s best to turn the heat down rather than stirring the jam too often.
After the bubbling subsides, you will notice that the bubbling starts to slow down a bit and look more glossy. Now it’s time to start stirring more frequently to prevent sticking to the bottom. The best tool for stirring is a sturdy flat-headed rubber spatula, which will allow you to feel the bottom of the pan and if anything is sticking to it.
Cooking Mixer by HUO SHI machinery has convenient for discharging food, easy to clean and easy to operate. The cooking mixer can be used for dessert cooking and mixing such as paste, jam, sugar, cream, candy and also for food cooking and mixing such as meat, vegetables, soup, rice, sauce,halwa, khoya, curries, other foods, medicines, syrups, pickles.
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