No Pectin Raspberry Jam Recipe

Tuesday, 06 October 2020

We did a big harvest of raspberries at the weekend, knowing the end is nigh for these beauties. They have served us well with lashings of fresh berries for over 2 months now but with the frosts nearing, there won’t be more home grown raspberries for much longer this year. So all the troops were rallied and a glut of raspberries were harvested. Said troops did a valiant effort of scoffing them but with plenty left over it seemed inevitable that a batch of raspberry jam would be the order of the day. Queue the need for a no pectin raspberry jam recipe…

Freshly picked raspberries, yum!

Pectin

With no jam making sugar in our local store, we decided to try out this no pectin raspberry jam recipe. And it worked a treat. Raspberries have a high amount of naturally produced pectin and by adding in some lemon juice you are increasing the pectin levels, allowing it to set. If you are finding your jam isn’t setting, keeping cooking it for 2 more minutes at a time, doing the chilled saucer test each time. A little added lemon juice will help too.

Non Pectin Raspberry Jam Recipe:

Ingredients

As you are not using pectin you don’t need quite as much sugar (bonus!) Normally you would have the same weight of fruit to sugar. We had 500g of raspberries and used 400g of sugar. We used the juice of one lemon.

The perfect use for a glut of raspberries in the garden

Method

Sterilise your jar(s)
Put a saucer in the fridge to chill.
Pop the raspberries, sugar and lemon into a pan. Some recipes say to mush the raspberries. Some say to cook and strain half the rasps then add to the remaining half. We didn’t bother with any of that. We simply chucked it all in the pan and brought it up to the boil then kept it on a rolling boil for 8 minutes, stirring as we went.
Drop some jam on the chilled plate and put it back in the fridge for 1 min. Check if it is wrinkling at the edges. If it is, it is ready. If it’s not, keep cooking it for 2 mins at a time and checking on the chilled saucer until you get the wrinkle. As we didn’t use pectin it took a little longer, probably around 12 mins.
Pop it into your sterilised jar then once cool it will store in a cool, dark cupboard for at least a year. If you can possibly not eat it all immediately!