Homemade Jams

I know it may seem strange, but I’m not generally a fan of homemade jams (don’t even get my started on the tasteless, cloyingly sweet stuff from the supermarket). Mostly because you can’t buy the quality of fruit you need for really good jam at the cost that makes it worthwhile making it into jam. From my extensive, though not exhausting, testing of jams, the best jams come from the farms directly or from people with access to the farms where the fruit is grown. They can use the fruit that is beyond what we can buy retail. Simply, the fruit we get in the shops looks great but often doesn’t taste that good, strawberries in particular. It took me a while to realise, wasting a lot of produce in the process, that the fruit that makes the best jam is the stuff that often looks unpalatable so would never make it into retail shops.  Because you mostly can’t taste fruit before you buy it, we go on looks alone. There might also be a general life lesson in that…

There are, of course, some exceptions. I find that jams where you add a lot of spices, or start with an apple base, are amazing homemade and often hard to buy because they are unusual.