Foliosus

Marionberries from Sauvie Island

Yesterday Sally and I went to Sauvie Island Farms to pick marionberries, and what a bountiful harvest it was. After a few hours with only a couple of minor scratches (those things have thorns!), we weighed in with 23 and a quarter pounds of gorgeous marionberries. When they are super fresh off the plant, and are warmed by the sun, they have a wonderful musky spiciness to them that I had never quite experienced like this. To date my marionberry consumption, though non-trivial, has been through farmer’s market berries, which are usually picked a day or two before they are sold. As good as those have been, freshly picked is better.

The first batch of marionberry jam

So what do you do with 23 pounds of berries? You make jam! Sally has been wanting to try canning for a while, and so we got the equipment we need assembled, and made marionberry jam. Our first batch produced 3 large jars. Professor Snape says, “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death.” Well, without any kind of wizardly training, anybody can bottle summer. I’m looking forward to enjoying these jams all winter long.

First batch: Marionberry jam

• 8 cups marionberries
• 5-6 cups sugar
• ½ cup lemon juice
• 1 tbsp. pectin
• Big splash of Chambord

I won’t delve in to the details of the jam-making process: essentially, you boil all of the ingredients, pour the hot jam into sterilized mason jars, seal them, and drop them in to boiling water for 10 minutes to “process” them, which means driving the air out. Then, as they cool, they seal themselves. But there are a lot of tips and tricks, for which I would refer you to a good canning book. Most of them have to do with keeping sterile and how to tell that your jam will set, and not be fruit soup or jello.

The second batch was more of the same, with the pectin adjusted a little bit (to 1 tbsp), and a smidge less sugar (5 cups), to bring out the berry flavor more. It was better.

The third batch was different, and included some things we got at the farmer’s market yesterday morning.

Third batch: Modified black and blue jam

• 6 cups marionberries
• 6 cups blueberries
• 7 cups sugar
• 2/3 cup lemon juice
• 4 teaspoons of lemon zest

It’s called “black and blue” because it’s intended for blackberries and blueberries. It’s more of a purple and blue when made with marionberries. This is a spectacular jam, full of rich flavor as the blue and marion play off of each other, and the whole thing is lifted and brought out by the zest. I highly recommend it.

The fourth batch was spiced.

Fourth batch: Spiced marionberry and apple jam

• 4 cups peeled, cored and chopped apples
• 1 cup red wine vinegar
• Zest of 2 lemons
• 6 cups marionberries
• 5½ cups sugar
• ½ teaspoon each of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves

In this case, you start out the apples, vinegar and lemon for about 10 minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients and the proceeding as you would with any other jam. The spices are subtle in the finished product, and they mesh with the muskiness of the berries very well. This would be fantastic on vanilla ice cream or on cheesecake, and tastes very autumn-like because of the spices.

All in all, it’s been a very productive day; we made a lot of jam. And we’ll be sure to enjoy it for the coming months.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Food, Plants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.