Sooooo… Yesterday I explained all the preparation steps for making your own jam. The tools, the pots, the timing. Pretty dry stuff, actually. Today’s lesson is a lot more drool-inducing, so grab a hanky and read on!

In an ARTitude Zine article about clearing out her studio, Marilee Fosbre quoted this folk wisdom: “If you have to swallow a lot of frogs, you might as well swallow the biggest one first.” In my case, that meant tackling the lemon curd first, because I’d never made it before and it requires a lot more attention to detail than regular jam does. Plus, I wanted to eat some as soon as possible.

Lemon curd is supposed to be cooked in a double boiler but I don’t have one, so I improvised by setting a large metal mixing bowl over a couple inches of boiling water in the Dutch oven.

In case you don’t know what lemon curd is, it’s a mixture of moderate quantities of lemon juice and lemon zest with about ten tons of sugar, whole eggs, extra egg yolks and butter. So how could it be bad? It’s delish on toast, waffles, between layers of cake…etc. And as numerous gift recipients reported, it’s not too shabby on a spoon, straight out of the jar.

To my surprise, the recipe suggested I use bottled lemon juice rather than freshly squeezed, because the bottled stuff is standardized to a certain acidity and flavor profile, while individual lemons may vary dramatically. This is important because canning is Better Living Through Science! and the acidity plays a vital role in keeping your gift recipients alive. Hey, using bottled lemon juice saved me a ton of work so I choose to believe that line of reasoning. And I still had to microplane the zest off nine lemons and about a dozen limes (the limes were my idea and they really added some zip!), so I was happy to pour juice out of a bottle.

I combined the ingredients in my improvised double boiler and stirred and stirred and stirred until I thought I would go mad. It takes a while for the enormous quantity of butter to melt, and then it takes another while for the mixture to thicken, but once it starts it happens pretty quickly.

That’s when I had the pleasure of forcing this giant pot of scalding, viscous goo through a strainer to remove the zest. It imparted its flavor to the curd and outlived its welcome, so it had to go. Stirring with a sterilized spatula helps to keep the zest from clogging up the fine mesh of the strainer, but no amount of elbow grease or prayer will ever restore that strainer to its pre-zest condition.

It’s more labor intensive than making regular jam, but the lemon curd is so incredibly delicious it’s worth the hassle. Oh, here’s a handy dandy tip from Suz: I strained my curd directly into a four cup Pyrex measuring cup, which allowed me to pour the curd straight into the prepared jars rather than having to ladle it in via a funnel. That was one of my Best. Brainstorms. Evah! (By the way, any containers or spatulas or anything else that comes in contact with the jam should be impeccably clean and it wouldn’t hurt to give it a dip in the sterilizing pot.)

One batch yielded three half-pint jars and two or three half-cup jars, so I guess I made four batches in all. That’s four dozen egg yolks, people! And three pounds of butter! And I forget how much sugar, but it was a lot.

A typical jam recipe will say to bring a lot of fruit and a little water (and a dash of life-preserving lemon juice) to a boil, then add some packaged pectin and bring back to a boil, THEN add the half-ton of sugar and bring to a hard boil for a certain amount of time. The stuff is pretty syrupy after the pectin step but then the avalanche of sugar really clogs up the pot for a moment. Just keep stirring and it will incorporate. And tell yourself, “At least jam needs a hell of a lot LESS stirring than that damn lemon curd!” And then dunk your finger into the remnants of sticky, delectable lemon curd still clinging to the sides of the Pyrex measuring cup, and savor, and sigh.

Isn’t this a gorgeous color? It just makes me happy.

 And this, the amaretto-peach-jam-whose-name-shall-not-be-uttered-in-polite-company, makes me happy for a whole bunch of other reasons too.

This is what a hard boil looks like. It’s a boil that you cannot stir down, if you know what I mean. A fierce boil that sends hellishly hot splatters of molten goo flying out of the pot and onto your supple and inviting decolletage. Again, it’s worth it.

Once the stuff is cooked, it goes into the sterilized jars while everything is still piping hot. A wide mouth funnel helps a lot but it is still sticky work. You must avoid leaving any smears of jam on the jar rims because that could compromise the seal. Follow the Ball website recommendations slavishly, okay? Wipe those rims! Of course, the jars are coming straight out of a sterilizing bath so it helps to have asbestos fingers, or heavily scarred and calloused fingertips from a lifetime of embroidery or beading.

Place a lid and a band onto each scrupulously prepared and filled jar, tighten the band to what they call “finger tight” and place gently into the canning bath as shown below (actually I could have fit several more jars into this pot, but that’s all I got out of one batch of lemon curd, and you can’t exactly wait around for the next batch to be ready for the bath).

Processing jam is easy. Load the canning bath, put the lid on, bring to a full boil and roll along merrily for however many minutes the recipe recommends. Lemon curd is a lot fussier. The curd must be cooked to a certain temperature, then transferred into jars, then placed into the canning bath when the water is at a certain temperature that is not yet a boil. Something like 180 degrees. The total time is however long it takes to get the pot back to a boil, plus however long the recipe says to process the curd. It is a bit of a production number. But as previously stated: So. Worth. It.

You don’t screw the bands onto the jars super-tight because air has to exit the jar during processing. That’s what creates a vacuum in the jars, keeps the food safe and sucks the lid middles down with a satisfying chorus of “thunk! thunk! thunk!” as the jars cool. The next day I tested the lid “buttons” to make sure they didn’t wiggle, retightened the bands that loosened during processing, and then I had a playdate with labels, Sharpies and about three miles of bubble wrap to make sure my work would survive the journey to my loved ones.

I can’t believe I neglected to take a photo of the ten million jars of finished jam! I guess I was delirious from the heat and the stirring and the 35 pounds of sugar. Did I mention that I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic a month later? True story. I gave away nearly all the jam but just being around that much sugar can be bad for your health, apparently.

Naturally, the moment one sets up a special place for the precious jam jars to cool for the obligatory 24 hour resting period, one’s cat decides that THAT is the exact spot for a perfect and long-overdue cat nap. Here is Quality Control Manager Panda, maintaining a vigil over the dwindling supply of homemade jam while I packaged the rest for delivery to loved ones. Thank god he was willing to pitch in help. He’s a giver. Maybe next time he can do some of the stirring??

In addition to the ornaments and scarves, last year’s holiday season at Casa de Suz was all about jam. I lost count of how many jars I prepared, but I know I used up a 35 pound bag of sugar!

Many people are nervous about making (or even just eating) homemade preserves, but if you follow the rules you won’t kill anyone. The only hard part is fitting enough big pots on your stove, and keeping each one on schedule so that each step synchronizes perfectly with the next.

I had a rather stressful December, and keeping my hands busy with all of these repetitive, rhythmic tasks really helped. I couldn’t WORRY while I was counting crochet stitches, and on jam making days my time was chopped into ten or fifteen minute segments so that didn’t allow much time for moping either. The rattling of glass jars against metal pots was a pleasant white noise that kept silence from feeling oppressive. And presto — no xmas shopping!

I made numerous batches of lemon curd, blueberry jam, and peach jam with either brandy or amaretto. The amaretto peach stuff kicks ass. Seriously! My friend Maria and I made some several years ago, and it was so delicious we spontaneously christened it with a very, very naughty name. (Filthy, actually. But this is a PG blog.)

If you decide to try home canning of preserves, be sure to check out the Ball website because they make the jars and tools, and they will tell you everything you need to know. They have good recipes, too. You can buy the tools, ginormous pots and other supplies at hardware stores like True Value or Ace (Walmart usually carries them too, and you should be able to find a set including a canning bath pot, rack, funnel, lifter and lid gizmo for about $50).

I’d like to say that I bought all of my fruit from the farmers market, but since I cooked this jam in December we all know that would be a lie. The lemons and limes were real. The berries and peaches were frozen. Yes! Frozen works fine, and it’s usually harvested and processed at its peak so the flavor is usually terrific. A ten pound bag of frozen peaches was enough for two batches of jam.

The first step is to wash the jars and bands in hot, soapy water. I always feel so happy with a platoon of adorable squeaky clean little jars taking shape on my counter! You can reuse canning jars and bands, but you need fresh lids each time (most supermarkets carry them).

Next, boil water. Lots of it. Baby-birthin’ quantities. I have my three largest pots on the stove the entire time. The huge one, which is officially a steam canner but I use it upside down as a regular water-bath canner instead, is where the filled jars get processed. Some pots come with a rack to keep the jars up off the bottom of the pot. I always put the rack in while the water comes to a boil, then when I put the first batch of filled jars into the rapidly boiling water I suddenly remember that this rack complicates my life unnecessarily and I have to fish it out with tongs while it is blazing hot. Not a good plan at all. But the jars do fine sitting on the pot floor, and the absence of a rack allows me to use taller jars.

The pot shown here needs more water in it, because the boiling water must cover the filled jars by at least an inch. And of course, water boils off all day so I top off the pot in between batches. That little hole in the pot (near the rim, at ten-o’clock) is how the steam escapes during processing.

My stock pot is called into service as a sterilizing bath. I keep it simmering all day on the back burner with a load of washed jars gently clanking together in there, while I cook the next batch of good stuff to fill them. I also dunk the lids into this boiling water, right before the lids go on the jars.

There is a nifty little tool, basically a stick with a magnet on one end, that makes this task fun, and there’s another nifty little tool that helps lift the jars out of whatever pot they are in (filled or not). I generally do not believe in single-task gadgets but these are worth ten times their weight in gold.

The third pot on the stove is where the cooking happens. I use an enameled cast iron Dutch oven. You should use a pot that has a heavy bottom and is much bigger than you think you need, because the jam will boil up to an unexpected volume and you don’t want more mess than is absolutely necessary.

Gawd, I’m exhausted and we haven’t even stirred our first batch yet. Thanks for reading this far. The actual cooking takes place tomorrow so come on back!