Time to Jam

It’s that amazing period of time at the end of hot summer in the Sierras when the blackberries drip off the branches, tomatoes pull down the vines, and strawberries send runners all over their beds.

In the thick of the harvest season, we’ve been thinking here about what it means to be truly sustainable and wanting to challenge ourselves to as an institution to take our sustainability to the next level. We grow much of our own food, but it turns out that feeding forty people three times a day necessitates quite a bit of food-- especially when half those people are seventeen year olds.

So instead of letting our need for enough pb&js stray from our goal of sustaining ourselves, we’ve decided to undertake the project of preserving as much of the bounty here as possible, in the form of jams, frozen veggies, jars of pesto, apple butter....

As I write this I sit by a large pot of blackberries burbling into jam and syrup on the stove, waiting for the jam to get hot and thick enough for me to pour into glass jars to can. Stirring the pot, I keep wondering: how much of our own food can we harvest and preserve if we work on it daily? Could we sustain ourselves for the whole winter? The whole year? Most importantly, what flavor of jam will be the tastiest in February: strawberry rhubarb lime or vanilla blackberry?

In an age when companies recall peanut butter due to salmonella scares, I feel lucky to be learning more about how to take advantage of what is growing around me, and empowered to actually know how. Lots of other folks know a lot more than I do, so if you’re interested in canning or preserving some jam yourself, here are some awesome sites to check out:

http://good.ly/bw47u

http://good.ly/scxb4

http://good.ly/b33im

The recipe I’ve been using makes about eight quarts of jam. Feel free to scale this down for more normal proportions. (Many folks make fantastic jams with just a 1:1 berry to sugar ratio and nothing else, if you’re a purist.)

• 36 cups of blackberries
• 10 cups of sugar
• juice from 2 lemons

Directions: Mash up the blackberries in a huge pot. Cook over medium heat, thickening and reducing the berry mash. Add in lemon juice. Bring to a low boil, then add the sugar. Stir constantly and continue to thicken. Finally bring to a rolling boil that cannot be stirred down for at least a minute. Then you’re ready to pour into cans for preserving, or just put it in the fridge to eat soon.

We’ve made about twenty quarts thus far, with buckets full of berries still waiting in the fridge…. We’ll see how many batches we make before all of our hands are permanently purple!