Here’s what I made the other day: ten (and a half) cups of two different pepper jams.

Basically, for any jam using pectin, you prepare fruit, add powdered pectin, bring to a full rolling boil that will not stir down for at least a couple minutes, add premeasured sugar and return to a full rolling boil for another minute, ladle into sterilized jars, ensure the rims of the jars are absolutely clear and clean, top with one-use metal dome lids, tighten on reusable metal rims, invert jars until cool enough to handle, turn right side up. By the time they are mostly cool, the dome should sink indicating the seal is good, often making a tink sound when they do, but not always.

NOTE: Nearly all current canning instructions require a boiling water bath to ensure the jars are completely sterile. My canning experience predates this recommendation. When I canned tomatoes and stone fruit and sauces in quart jars back in the day (the 80s), I used a boiling water bath. I have never done this with jams or marmalades or chutneys. I keep everything boiling hot when I fill and seal my jams. I have never had a problem.

PREPARE: Have everything ready before you begin.

Wearing gloves, prepare fire-roasted hot red peppers, by rubbing off the charred skins, splitting open and removing seeds and any tough membranes. I did this in the sink, one pepper at a time over a fine sieve placed in a colander, and under running cold water.

Measure out sugar in a bowl and place by the stove.

Put clean glass canning jars in the dishwasher without soap on a hot wash or sanitizer wash. Plan to begin making the jam at about the time the cycle will finish (my dishwasher tells me how many minutes it has to go). Keep the dishwasher door closed except to remove one jar at a time so that they are hot when you fill them.

Place the dome lids in a saucepan with water and boil. You will also need an ordinary fork or tongs to pluck each one out of the water as you need it. The screw-on metal rims do not need to be sterilized.

Set out a ladle, large spoon, small bowl for skimming foam, large canning funnel. Mine is glass.

Put peppers in food processor with blade and process till semi-smooth. Add vinegar and briefly whirl. Add pectin and whirl till combined.

1 pound of fire-roasted hot red peppers

1 cup cider vinegar 

packet of pectin*

(The packaged recipe says to measure the prepared fruit, but I almost never do that.) Place in a 6-8 quart kettle and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil and add

4 cups of sugar

Return to a boil, still stirring, and here is why you need a really big canning kettle because it foams up high. I use long-handled bamboo spoon to stir and a 6 quart Le Creuset dutch oven. Mine is dark green on the outside and very pretty. I turn off the heat (usually while it’s in its last minute of boiling because the cast iron holds the heat for so long) and quickly use a large spoon to skim off foam into a bowl. There’s nothing wrong with the foam, it just shouldn’t go in jars since it’s mostly air. I use a cloth to hold the jars while I tighten on the rims since they are literally boiling hot. I tighten the rims by hand—that’s tight enough. After a day, I can remove the rims. The lids do not need them once they have sealed and cooled completely.

This yields about 5 cups of jam. Except I didn’t do it quite like this either time.

BATCH ONE: Since I cannot follow a recipe exactly. Ever. I made two batches. The first used the last 12 ounces of strawberry shrub I made earlier in the summer and feared I would not finish while it was still good. Since shrub is basically fruit and sugar and cider vinegar, I swapped out the shrub for the vinegar and 1 cup of sugar. So . . . one and a half cups of shrub instead of the cup of vinegar and three cups of sugar instead of four. The jam is a pretty and intense red. Shown at right in photos. The black flecks are tiny bits of charred skin from the fire-roasting. I think they are pretty so I am not too obsessive about fishing them out, but you might think they look nasty. I do fish out any seeds I missed.

BATCH TWO: The other batch has wild black huckleberries. I bought three half-pounds from the vender at Portland’s Farmers’ Market, as I try to do each year. (I used to pick them myself, but lately all my wild berry patches seem overrun by tourists.) James Beard’s Huckleberry Cake (one of two recipes I do mostly follow, and you can find it online by searching the name) calls for a cup of huckleberries. When I packed most of the berries into 1-cup parcels for the freezer, I discovered I had hoarded a cup, still in the back of the freezer since last summer and well past its best-used-by date. I thawed and added that 1 cup of Oregon black huckleberries to the peppers without making any other adjustments to the recipe. It turned the jam dark red-burgundy. Shown at left in photos.

Both batches went well, though I had not quite a fifth jar from the first batch. I added this to the last bit from the second batch of five full jars, reboiled (yes, you can do this), and then got the tenth jar. All ten sealed and were set by the next day. Sometimes jams need a day, and sometimes do not “set” (turn thick) at all. That’s happened to me with marmalade a couple of times.

My cast iron kettle takes a long time to cool, and all the time it’s doing that, the last bits of jam—too little to fill a jar—simmer and steam—going thick and possibly scorching. I added water to the kettle—just a splash—and stirred it in so that I could scrape down the bottom and sides and salvage the last of the cooked jam. I got another half cup that cooked right down into jam of proper consistency. I put a spoonful on a scoop of vanilla ice cream last night. Mixed jam shown in middle of top photo, fifth from right.

I mean to make green poblano pepper jam, but my husband wants chili verde, so I will need to combine a half pound of peppers with something else. I have Italian prunes . . .

*I am not entirely comfortable using prepared pectin to thicken my jam. I use all organic fruit and organic sugar, so MCP or Sure-Jell is not an entirely happy addition. There are alternatives. I could boil the fruit down to make it thick, but I wonder what that does to flavor and nutrition. Boiling down apples is the obvious and readily-available alternative and the traditional technique. Apples naturally have their own pectin so they don’t need any added. They make jelly without anything added but sugar and lemon juice (most apples are way too sweet these days, lacking acid). I have also used other fruit to thicken my jam. The local salal berries have enough natural pectin that I combine them with blackberries to make a dark purple jam without added commercial pectin, but we didn’t have any blackberries this year. Another wild berry, aronia berries (chokeberries), native of the other coast, also have a great deal of pectin and I have used them with great success alone and combined with other fruit.

Properly made and sealed jams and preserves with keep a very long time. My last meat meal was the last quart jar of canned mincemeat (made with venison) that I’d lost at the back of a shelf. It was at least two or three years old. I could not resist making a last mincemeat pie. The animal was long dead and I see no virtue in wasting food. (And I did relish mincemeat once upon a time. I am not vegetarian because I “never liked meat” but because I didn’t want to eat animals I would not want to kill.)

I always make jam and not jelly, because I cannot bring myself to discard the solids, and I actually like eating jam more than jellies. The transparency of the latter is pretty but jellies lack the mouth-feel that I enjoy.

The amount of sugar in any preserve can be halved (which I’ve done) or even eliminated (which I never have), but the jam must then be refrigerated until eaten within a relatively short time. Strawberries, it seems to me, could be boiled down without any addition and eaten as “preserves” but from the refrigerator.

Alternatives to cane sugar include honey, which foams like mad. Use slightly less since honey has more sugar cup-for-cup than granulated sugar. (I know, weird.) Minimal amount of maple syrup works, too, but again, refrigerate. Date sugar or coconut sugar would probably work too. A boiling water bath might seal and sterilize jars with less sugar, but I have always understood the acid-and-sugar balance is critical to safe canning.

Even so, while I mostly follow the instruction in the pectin packets, I fiddle, and often add something like fresh ginger or combine fruits and berries, always careful to add lemon or lime juice that seem called for, especially in very sweet fruits. The acid is critical.