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Jamming! ... and jellying too.

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I made bell pepper jam (the purple ones lose their colour, boo) and I've made onion and spices jam but I haven't been brave enough to add jalapenos to aything... some of my family and in-laws don't do so great with hot spices, and like Wildoates, I don't eat a whole lot of it myself. I did however pick up a packet of crumpets, they should be good for at least the two little containers of extra jam.

I label the jars because a lot of jams look alike and if you have two open at the same time it's easy to get the lids confused, and sometimes I do put odd things in them that not everyone can eat (my hubby's grandmother can't have anything alcoholic so I have to be really careful about labelling any jam containing wine)... so mostly for safety's sake, I label the jars. Most of the time the labels come off about as easily as my wine bottle labels (shipping labels from Staples). And if fingernails don't work, I have stainless steel scrubbies. They get just about anything off :)

So dragon fruit are REALLY REALLY SLIMY. And they don't taste like much, either. The variety I can get is the pink skin, white flesh, so I'm sort of shaving off the outer skin and leaving the pretty pink fleshy skin in the hopes that it will at least look pretty, since it sure doesn't taste like much :p Good thing I didn't pay full price for them, they're usually $5 each!
 
To tell you the truth, unless it's hot pepper jam I won't eat it either, bell peppers give me indigestion (and yet I'm OK with banana peppers, jalapehos and shepherd peppers). Many things I make for two main reasons - to see if it works, and to give it away.
 
The other variety of dragonfruit, with the pink insides, is VERY flavorful. However, they're close to $10 each when I can get them, so for me to turn one into a mead I'd have to have quite a bit of cash on hand. :( They're extremely sweet and the closest I can compare the flavor is like a pomegranate without any sharp notes. If I could smooth out the overtly sweetness of them I'd LOVE them, but as is I'm still working on other recipes with them in my head. Possibly figs to round out the flavor profile a bit more? Dunno.
 
Well, I chopped up half of them and froze them 'cause I won't have time to jam them, and froze the other half whole, I suspect the whole ones will end up in the next Chevette Weirdomel incarnation :)
 
the Mulberry tree gives us gallons of fruit for jelly every year. Two red varieties of raspberries, plus the golden raspberries also make excellent jelly. Blackberries, Elderberries, and Currants as well.

Must try some of these in melomels next summer!
 
My mom has a mulberry tree but either it never produces or she just lies about it and keeps all the fruit for herself so I don't even know what they taste like :)

I've never tasted a golden raspberry, are they as different from red ones as the black ones are?

I love red currants for wine so much I won't "waste" them on jelly... same with black currants, only different...
 
You folks familiar with quince? I wasn't, until my wife's boss gave us some a few weeks ago from his tree. Very sweet smelling fruit. We made jam, jelly and syrup, which turned a beautiful reddish color.

We've also made jam in the past from loquat. Our tree has tons of blossoms now, and bees and even hummingbirds are pollnating them. If the crop turns out good, I'll likely make a batch of loquat mead.
 
I've never seen a quince, and I bought a loquat at the asian market one year just to see what they were all about because one of the other members mentioned having 20 lbs of frozen loquats, it was smaller than a lime and cost me $.69! Good thing you get them for free, it would cost me a fortune!

Up here, we can only grow hardier things... like rhubarb, apples, pears, currants, raspberries, strawberries etc... even peaches won't grow this far north and only certain grape varieties (the wild ones do well, at least). Oh, and the harvesting season for everything except rhubarb and apples is a few weeks at most, no strawberries all year around like in CA!
 
Yes, golden raspberries do have a different taste. Much lighter and more of an after flavor I think. Were currently trying to cultivate a few clippings we got at a plant swap. I'm hoping to be able to harvest enough about two years from now. We also have a pretty good size patch of wild black raspberries near my house that the neighborhood descends upon as soon as they start to ripen. And this past summer we planted a Cherry and Peach tree in our back yard. Supposedly their self propagating for the fruit, not sure I wanna get into how that's done since I thought you needed a male and female tree but anyways, that we hope to get something from... at some point. The peach tree actually produced one peach by the end of the season. We were all excited and planed to pick it and make this big fuss over it and have a fun old time... till the dog took a running leap and ate it thinking it was a tennis ball... Oh, and we have this scrubby thing in the back yard that produced quince, I didn't realize they were supposed to come from trees.
 
I think self-propagating trees, instead of having male and female trees, produce male and female flowers on one tree. At least in my (very) general understanding. My pear tree is self-propagating.
 
Most flowers have both male and female parts and some flowers can self-pollinate, others need pollen from other flowers (dunno how they tell the difference), and some plants only have pollen OR receptors, I think squash plants make separate male and female flowers.
 
A slight change of direction in the discussion . . .

Do any of you jelly/jam/preserve makers put any of this in your carboy to make mead or wines?

Jelly/jam making is one way of intensifying the flavours - from an eating perspective. I wondered if this translates to the bottle when used as the flavour base for a mead or wine?
 
One member who hasn't been that active of late used to use crabapple jelly in her Robin Hood themed mead because she wanted crabapples but couldn't get the actual fruit, you need to make sure you use pectinase if you do this!

Although having made jam and having made wine, the amount of fruit you use in a whole batch of jam or jelly is comparable to what you'd put into a gallon of mead so I don't think you'd get all that much out of adding a jar or two of jelly to your must that you wouldn't have gotten just by using the fruit.

Now, what I HAVE done is steam my pears or crabapples to soften and release the juices and collect enough juice to make a batch of jelly, and then make wine with the pulp and the rest of the juice.
 
Today I did raspberry jelly cheat (from bottled juice, the rest of the juice is going to be Turkish Delight), dragonfruit jam (I watched the lovely pink colour fade about three bottles in :( ) and just finished the kiwi-strawberry jam (a dozen kiwis to about 20 strawberries). And now the challenge - wild raisin.

They'd dried out since I picked them (my pony is so patient, I couldn't have reached them without her!) I picked all the stems and icky ones out, soaked them in hot water to rehydrate (brought briefly to a simmer then covered and left for about 4 hours) and was hoping my food mill would do the job but alas it fails me yet again. So now I'm going in there with the potato masher before I run them through the food mill.
 
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