Thank you!
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Seems like there are lots of folks doing jamming and canning! What a great way to launch Spring 
Reminder that if your water bath processing time is 10+ minutes, no need to sterilize anything. Pre-heat the jars in hot water (not boiling) if you are filling with hot stuff (i.e., jam), but not if you are processing fish or raw meat.
The lids, from Ball/Bernardin, no longer need to be heated for the seals to set.
For the best low-sugar results, I do small batches. Most recently, 600 gm of chopped apples, cooked until tender then mashed a bit. Then cooked with 100gm sugar about 15 minutes until thickened. Recipe is from Marisa Maclellan’s Preserving By The Pint. Yield was 2x 250 ml jars.
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Fwiw I also keep strawb batches small so I don’t have to cook them to death.
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I am just eating some of those pickled Asian pears and they still have good flavor and texture!
I picked about 8 cups of red and golden raspberries from our bushes and made low-sugar jam. My husband picked another ~3.5 c the next day!
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If I had a bounty of fresh raspberries like that I’d be too tempted to eat them as-is.
Heck, they probably wouldn’t even make it much past the garden before I’d start chomping at them.
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Same here. I’d come back into the house and tell Mrs. ricepad that, sadly, there are no raspberries, while at the same time desperately trying to hide the red juice dribbling down my chin.
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Ha! Ha! Ha! Pardon my French, but you guys aren’t growing raspberries. We’ve been hit-or-miss with home-garden patches over the last decade+, but in good years, it’s a squabble as to who has to go out and pick, and where we gonna put them in the freezer (or canner) once picked!
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They are prolific indeed!
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I know what you mean.
We have two mulberry trees … sigh.
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Black currant freezer jam today, with black currants from our garden. Fairly close to David Lebovitz’s recipe. I don’t add any wafer.
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Thank you so much for the link. It looks like we’ll be getting our first few black currants from the bush in our yard this year. Question: are they not as seedy as the red currant? I’ll be de-seeding those for currant jelly, but yours is a true, beautiful jam.
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They are quite seedy, I would say equally seedy. I strain the seeds out for gelatins.
I have made some seed free jams but I need fibre so I usually leave them in. 
I had quite a long black currant thread on CH.
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Got it - thanks!
A question for jam makers:
I have over a quart of frozen raspberries which I used to infuse alcohol for another project. If I eat one, the alcohol is most decidely present. Anyone care to venture whether I can use these to make a non-alcoholic jam (ie will the alcohol and alcohol flavor cook out)?
Much of the alcohol (maybe 95%?) will evaporate out. Chemically speaking, I don’t think you will make this mixture completely alcohol free.
What other options do you have for the fruit? If you would otherwise be discarding, no harm in trying to make a jam. Weigh the fruit, add 25-50% (by weight) of sugar, and boil it down. If you use a 12” (31 cm) diameter pot, the batch should cook down in less than 30 minutes.
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Are you planning to process it? If so, I would think that the booze would mostly cook out, although I’m not sure how the presence of alcohol may affect the effectiveness of the seal as well as long term shelf stability, but I would bet anything that the alcohol will lose a lot of it’s edge, and is worth a try.
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