I’ve always loved blackberry jam. I mean, really, I’ve always loved blackberries, for much the same reason that I’ve always loved grapefruit – I find fruit a lot more interesting when it’s tart as well as sweet. And blackberry jam has always been the go-to jam in my family – there’s always an open jar in the fridge, and we’ll go long, long stretches without any other sort of jam in the house.
One of my father‘s standard runs takes him up over the top of Twin Peaks. This being San Francisco, the sides of the road are covered in blackberry bushes – in this climate, the plant is the best kind of weed, growing tasty fruit everywhere. Every year, as the berries start coming in, my father would start coming home from runs with reports as to just how many were ripe.
So, of course, it was inevitable that I’d eventually get around to picking a bunch and making my own blackberry jam. But as I was planning this project earlier this week, I thought to myself – if the fruit is local and organic, why not make the entire jam local and organic? Since the berries were from within city limits, could I manage an entire batch of jam from within city limits?
Of course, the first issue with this plan is sugar, a decidedly non-local ingredient. A quick Google found my solution: Local honey, produced by San Francisco beekeepers, and sold by the wonderful CityBees. A quick trip to the Castro Farmers’ Market, and I was the delighted owner of two cups worth of the mildest honey they had – the Portrero Hill variety. (Admittedly, I also walked away with some West Marin blackberry honey, some of the tastiest honey I’ve ever encountered, and a belly full of samples of just about all their other varieties. Oh, and a frequent buyer card. Can’t wait until the next farmers’ market…)
The next problem was pectin. Now, I never use commercial pectin anyway: Contrary to what many websites say, every time I’ve compared recipes that use commercial pectin with recipes that don’t, the pectin recipes have used considerably more sugar, yielding sweeter, less fruity jams. But for this project especially, commercial pectin was clearly right out. Unfortunately, so was my usual solution, adding apples: I had no idea where to find apples grown inside the city. What to do?
The solution was closer to home than anything so far: Lemons! The peels, membranes, and seeds of all citrus fruit are fairly high in pectin, and luckily, my family has a lemon tree growing in our yard. Blackberries themselves, particularly when slightly under-ripe, contain a fair amount of pectin as well, so I didn’t anticipate any real problem.
At first I was dreadfully worried that two cups of honey wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for the 9 cups of blackberries that I’d already picked, so (despite having previously sworn to myself never to make jelly again) I initially started straining the blackberries to make jelly. I quickly discovered that they had cooked down to about 4 cups, which I believed would give me the right proportion of honey to fruit, and so I ended up using almost all of the pulp anyway, with only a small amount strained out. But, as it turned out, this honey was rather more potent than I had believed, and I needed only 1.5 cups for all that fruit. (More for eating!) Furthermore, blackberries have quite a bit more pectin than I was anticipating, and jelled up quite nicely; I suspect that I could have gotten away with considerably less lemon, and still had a lovely jam.
And so:
San Francisco City Limits Blackberry Jam.
- 9 cups wild blackberries from Twin Peaks (cooked down to about 4 cups; see above)
- 1.5 cups Portrero Hill honey
- peel from 1 lemon, from my own back yard (or less: see above)
Cook blackberries down, possibly straining a bit of the seeds and pulp if you like a less pulpy jam. Add honey and lemon peel, and boil until set. Process in hot water bath, as usual.
Tasty! Can’t wait to make a second batch in August, once the rest of the berries ripen…