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Monday, October 15, 2012

Apples are everywhere: apple and ginger jam


This weekend was fall fun from beginning to end: we looked at fireworks (Bonfire Night is coming up); went for a short hike up Mt Kearsarge on a beautifully crisp, clear day scattered with red and yellow leaves; went apple picking and bought lots of squashes at Carter Hill Orchard; ate apple pie...  And we had a Harvest Festival at the garden, during which we cranked out a lot of fresh apple juice using a wonderful vintage press and ate amazing soup containing foraged maitake mushrooms and acorns. I took a few of the extra, slightly bruised apples to make some apple jam.

I used this recipe before, when I had a constant (in Autumn) supply of cooking apples from the trees around the allotments in Norwich - our plot was right at the bottom of the space, and as I walked along the track to it I always found windfalls scattered on the road and figured they were fair game - they were only going to last until the next car came along if I didn't pick them up. The jam is surprisingly good: apples are too mild in taste (and lacking in texture) for a jam by themselves, but the addition of lemon and ginger makes a wonderful, golden, spicy jam in a relatively short time.

(makes ~6 regular sized jars)

3 lb apples
600ml water
2 lemons
2 one inch pieces of fresh root ginger
1 heaped tsp ground ginger
3 lb sugar

Peel, core and chop the apples. Put the apple pieces into a large pan with the water. Put the peel and cores into a muslin bag and tie up tightly, then add the bag to the pan. Grate the lemon zest and squeeze the lemons, then add the zest and juice to the pan. Peel the fresh ginger and grate one piece into the pan. Chop the other piece of fresh ginger into two and put in the pan. Add the ground ginger. Simmer until the apples are softened. Fish out the bag and squeeze as much juice out of it as you can. Add the sugar and boil hard until setting point is reached. Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then fish out the two large chunks of ginger and spoon the jam into sterilised jars.

(see Methods page for notes on set point, jar sterilisation and jar filling)


The original recipe calls for crystallised ginger, of which I had none so decided to try using fresh ginger instead. It came out pretty good: you don't get the chunks of gingeriness you would with the crystallised ginger but the jam is still nice and gingery - each mouthful is different, depending whether you get a bit of lemon zest or more ginger or just apple. The set is firm but perfect and it is a great spreading jam as the apples are pretty much completely smoothed out.

I actually had twice this quantity of apples, but decided they would be too much jam so stewed the rest to make an apple puree / apple sauce. The apples were all eating apples - I have never yet found real cookers here - so all I did was peel, core and chop, then heat in a covered saucepan until they collapsed, without adding anything, and the sauce/puree came out amazingly sweet.
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