On occasion with little, um... much, fault of your own some projects just turn themselves into a comedy of errors. It can be bad timing, disorganisation, just basic lack of attention or in the case of this grape jam a wondrous combination of all three. Often when this happens all you can do is look back, laugh at yourself, then share it with the entire internet because having others laugh with you makes you feel just slight less crazy for dissolving into a puddle of laughter in the middle of the kitchen every time you look at the jars.
The beginning of this story goes back to around March last year when a delightful fellow offered M all the grapes that she wanted to pick. Between the two of us we decided we wanted to play with the idea of grape juice and maybe jam if we could find a recipe that we thought we would like. Trying whole grape juice thing we never really produced a product that we thought we were happy with so at the end of the day packed 2.3 kg of grapes into my freezer so that we could get back to them at will.
It seems for one reason or another, probably because none of us are huge fans of sweet jam, neither of us were particularly focused on this endevour. Personally I kept forgetting they were there until I needed more freezer space and I had to work out what that huge bag of red things contained. Unluckily I have a reasonably large amount of freezer space so this didn't happen with enough frequency to ever get more than mildly annoying and they stayed there. Until it hit me, we were getting toward Autumn and there were probably more grapes coming.
This thought spurred me into action on finding a recipe that our households would be likely to eat. In a fit of motivation I hit the internet and came up with
Spiced Grape Jam designed to be a whole lot more sophisticated than your average sweet grape jam and the blurb suggested serving with bagles and cream cheese. This immediately made me think that it would probably be a wonderful condiment on a cheese platter with some nice quality cheeses and that is a thought I could appreciate. I was sold, that pile of grapes was going to become Spiced Grape Jam.
Now is where the problems start.. well, it's a loverly recipe but, um... how many grapes is a quart? Now the site I was using was American so this is not exactly unexpected although I hadn't been hit with a Quart before. I used their handy dandy US to metric conversion tool and everything in the recipe was converted to Mls. Yes, Mls? How on this brown earth am I supposed to measure out aprox 1900ml of grapes and around 1400ml of sugar? It was at this pointI unwisely decided to wing it and went for equal weight of grapes and sugar and assumed with my 2.3 kg of grapes I should double the rest of the ingredients. Of course I didn't actually have tart apples because... well just because, so I used the ones that were doing their best to die in the fruit bowl.
Just after I got everything in the stock pot up to a rolling boil then let it slow boil for another 20 mins is when I realised I was supposed to be at the Community Fire Meeting. I had a couple of seconds of minor freakout gathered all of my things, at some point it seems remembered to turn off the gas, although that had to be confirmed later as I didn't remember actually doing it and sped toward the information session. Returning around 2 hours later having basically forgotten that I had doubled the recipe.
I then used my fruit crusher thingy, with much expermimentation to try and minimise it crushing the seeds into the mix, to separate the skins and seeds from the pulp and juice. As I wanted to hot pack the jam into the jars then waterbath I reheated the jam up to a slow boil while boiling the jars and lids in the waterbath. It was at this point I got the call from the
Fire Tree to say there was an emergency in the National Park. As quickly as possible between fielding phone calls and doing property tours to ensure we were not in emmenent danger of burning down I packed jam into jars then waterbathed the lot.
At this point I was hopeful. It tasted sweeter than I would prefer but should be fine with a good sharp cheese and well considering everything it was a wonder it had got this far without being burnt. Everything was set to cool overnight.. and it was half way through the next morning that I though to check for gell and oops, the stuff was basically liquid. That should have been totally expected since I doubled the recipe but didn't change the cooking time.
Needless to say that wasn't going to work for what I was planning to use it for. I grabbed my largest saucepan dumped the contents back onto the stove and like any cook who just had their day rearranged by their own stupidity, walked away. In theory I was only planning on walking away for long enough to regain my dignity, and the jam would take a while to heat back up anyway.
Unfortunately as my head wasn't acutally in cook space I walked away and forgot to check back. Next time I accidentally walked past the kitchen the saucepan was boiling hard and I honestly don't know for how long. I checked everything at that point and luckily it hadn't burned to the pan... so then I started checking it for gell. Woohoo... wrinkels, but it tasted different and I couldn't put my finger on why.
As I was again repacking it into bottles it hit me... the hard boil had caremalised the sugar and I could hardly taste the grapes.
Oh well, no idea what I am going to use it for now but at least I have probably made a good 12 months worth of canning mistakes all in one go.
