With the blackcurrant bushes overflowing, we found ourselves thinking of delicious things to do with them. Having picked over 3 kilos in a few days (even if we did eat quite a few on the spot) it was obvious that we had to preserve them somehow. This turned into a blackcurrant feast with jam, Swedish-style blackcurrant cordial, bottled fruit and a yoghurt and blackcurrant cake – so good we had to make it again the next day.
We’re posting the recipes for all these things below, just in case anyone else is in the same situation…
Blackcurrant Jam
This jam is simple and delicious (we know because we already ate a whole jar!). Currants are a great fruit to make jam with because they’re high in pectin – especially when just under-ripe, though ours weren’t – so they set without adding any other fruits. This recipe is from the River Cottage Handbook of Preserves.
We used
1.5 kg of blackcurrants, without twigs or stalks (though the shrivelled bit left from the flower can stay)
2,250 kg of sugar
900 ml of water
Put the currants with the water in a pan and place over a low heat to bring to simmering point. Leave for 15-20 mins (the fruit should be soft but not totally disintegrated), then add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved. Then, bring to a full rolling boil and maintain it for 5 minutes while stirring.
Remove from the heat and continue stirring gently for a couple of minutes to cool. You’ll know if the jam is ready by testing for the setting point. When it is done decant into sterilised jars – from our currants we got (more or less) six:
Jam!
Bottled Blackcurrants
This is a great way to preserve the little delicious black balls themselves. This project was also a way to test out using the solar cooker and oven to sterilise jars, which was definitely the most work-intensive part! To sterilise jars we boiled water in the solar cooker (at about 88 degrees centigrade) and filled up the jars, which we then left in the solar oven for some twenty minutes.
Jam jars sterilising in the solar oven, with the screw tops in hot water
We needed:
1,750 kg blackcurrants
1,2 l water
450 g sugar
a few lemon verbena leaves from the garden
The actual bottling involved cleaning the blackcurrants and packing them into the jars, with a few verbena leaves layered in each. Then, we added the syrup we made from the sugar and water – it should be at 60 degrees. We closed the jars without tightening the lids much and put them in a deep pan with a tea towel at the bottom filled with warm (38 C) water up to the jar necks. The point of this step is to create a vacuum inside the jars by slowly heating the water to simmering point (88C again) and letting it boil for just a couple of minutes before removing the bottles and tightening the lids. After a day or so, they should be properly sealed and last for about a year… Fingers crossed.
Adding hot syrup to the jars
To be continued due to low solar power…
Hedvig & Sara
Fantastic! We’ve also got a copy of the (wonderful) RC Preserves book. Alas, no blackcurrants for us this year but we spent yesterday making plum jam, plum jelly and plum cordial. We made the sublime elderflower cordial last month – great with soda water. We’ve also just made a small solar dehydrator so look forward to using that – prunes, perhaps?
Your solar cooker is fascinating, alas not enough sunshine here (well actually all of June was really sunny), but not normally enough sunshine… but the blackcurrants on my allotment are just about ready too… not enough to bottle though… perhaps one summer pudding! I”ll be quicker with the netting next year and then the birds will get less of them! Am dreaming of moving to Portugal … three years until hubby retires and then… well… lets not count chickens quite yet. Love your blog!