It’s much nicer to heat up the kitchen in December than it is in August.  Winter has become my jam-making time.  I need to make some room in the freezer, so I’m ready to make elderberry jam.

As an added benefit, I’ve found I get a lot more juice from frozen/thawed berries than fresh ones.  As an experiment, in September I processed three pounds of berries that had only been frozen a week or so and got 3-1/2 cups of juice (a little less than 1-1/4 cups per pound).  In December, I processed four pounds of berries and got 7 cups of juice (1-3/4 cups per pound).

So let’s proceed.  Put the cleaned elderberries into a pot and gently heat them to encourage them to start releasing their juice.  If they are frozen, that’s OK.  I don’t bother to defrost them. Mash gently with a potato masher and stir them around a bit.

After asking BarBBQ Bill what he wanted – jam or jelly (he voted for jam), flavored or not (his won’t be flavored, but mine will), I decided to put this batch through the food mill so I’d get a bit of pulp in the juice.  This is technically “jam”.  If I’d wanted jelly, I would have dumped the heated, mashed berries into a jelly bag (or if you don’t have one of those, an old clean pillowcase or a couple of layers of damp cheesecloth in a sieve or colander works fine, too), let it drip through the bag for a while and gotten nice clear juice.  Steps would be the same – the finished product would just be slightly different.

Put a portion of the warmed berries into the food mill and start cranking!

After a few minutes, all the juice and pulp (not much pulp) will be in the bowl, and you’ll be left with seeds and sticks.

My four pounds of elderberries yielded 7 cups of juice.  I’m going to use 4 cups of it for a No Sugar Needed Fruit Pectin (which I bought by mistake and was due to expire) and that will satisfy BarBBQ Bill’s plain old not-too-sweet-no fancy-carp-in-my-jam requirement.

Well, I have 3 cups left to experiment with.  I’m going to use Pomona Pectin in this recipe.  I like working with Pomona – I can use alternative sweeteners like honey, agave nectar or maple syrup and it’s very easy to experiment with small batches of jam.

I decided to try Elderberry with Honey and Port Wine for this batch.

Put three cups of elderberry juice in a large heavy-bottomed pot (this one is 8 quarts and you’ll see later how close it came to boiling over), preferably stainless steel but anything non-reactive will do.  Add 2 tablespoons lemon juice. I like the “sparkle” that lemon juice gives to elderberry flavor.

Here’s the contents of a package of Pomona Pectin.  One pouch (the larger one) contains the brownish pectin.  The smaller packet is white calcium powder (monocalcium phosphate).  Mix 1/2 teaspoon of the calcium powder with 1/2 cup of water and store in a jar.  This keeps a long time in the refrigerator. Make sure you label the jar – otherwise, it will get thrown out (ask me how I know that).

Have your boiling water bath heating and jars, lids and rings ready to go.

Add 3 teaspoons of calcium water to the juice and begin bringing it to a boil.

Measure out 1 cup of room-temperature honey and add 3 teaspoons of pectin.  Mix well.  Elderberries are low in natural pectin, so I’m adding 1 teaspoon of pectin per each cup of juice.

When the juice boils, add the honey/pectin mixture and stir.  I use a whisk to help dissolve everything.  Bring it back to a vigorous boil (you won’t be able to stir it down) and stir constantly.  If your jam threatens to boil over (like this one), simply take it off the heat for a few seconds to let it calm down a bit.  Boil for one minute, then take it off the heat.

Stir in the port wine.  I used 9 tablespoons for this batch.  Keep tasting until the flavor is where you want it.  Any time I add wine or liqueur to a jam or jelly recipe, I stir it in at the end to maintain more of the flavor.

Fill the jars leaving 1/4″ of headspace at the top.  A canning funnel and a small ladle make this a lot easier.

Skim off any foam, stray seeds or bubbles with a teaspoon.  Take a damp towel and thoroughly wipe off the rim.  It must be clean to make sure the lid seals properly.  Add a heated lid and screw on a ring.

Put the filled jars into the boiling water bath.  Since I have boiled/sterilized my jars, I’m going to process these for 5 minutes.  If you use just heated jars (warmed up but not boiled), process for 10 minutes. Either way is fine.

When the processing time is up, remove the canner lid and turn off the heat.  Leave the jars in the water for another 5 minutes.

Remove the jars from the canner and let them cool on a towel.  After 24 hours, check the seals, remove the rings, wash the jars and store in a cool, dark place.

We have 8 jars of lovely elderberry jam.  One note – low sugar jams or those made with honey or maple syrup don’t keep as long as regular jellies and jams (all that sugar in jelly is a preservative), so, once opened, keep them in the fridge and use them up within a month or so.  That’s another reason I like to use these 4 oz. canning jars.

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