My bread machine makes jam. Yes, it’s true.
When I got a bread machine for Christmas last year, it was exciting. I’m certain I haven’t bought a loaf of bread from the store since. What I wasn’t certain about was that it could apparently make jam. Could I really toss all my ingredients into this bread-making machine and it’ll make jam?
At the beginning of the year, I wanted to try making jam in my bread machine, but I was too pregnant and not bothered. A couple of weeks before Asher was born, someone gave me some pectin. Knowing that I certainly wasn’t going to have time to make jam when the baby came, I put it aside until last weekend.
The grocery store around the corner from us had a bunch of fruit on sale. Most fruit you buy in the store in England is imported, so in general it’s pretty expensive. It was a treat to find it cheap enough to give a reason for buying a ton of it to freeze! I seized the opportunity and bought a bunch of peaches, blueberries and strawberries. Last year I froze all the strawberries and blueberries I bought. This year we froze some peaches, too, so that I could have some to purée for Asher when he starts solids. With some of the strawberries and peaches I decided to try to make jam!
I’d pinned a couple of recipes on Pinterest awhile back to try: one for strawberry jam; the other for spiced peach preserves. Both recipes called for low-sugar pectin, which I didn’t have. I think that was part of the reason I had to use an entire sachet of pectin for both recipes. Leon and I also figured out we needed to run the jam cycle twice in order for it to set a bit more (otherwise we would have ended up with a lovely sauce!). It still wasn’t as thick as I would have liked… maybe that’s the nature of homemade jam?
Both still taste delish!
I had no idea a bread machine could make jam. Gonna have to try with mine…. :)