Choosing your gelling agent
La Chambre explains how to use gelling agents to make jam: the juice, apple pips and peel, fruit stones, agar-agar, jam sugar, or combining fruits.
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Ingredients
Gelling agents help jam set. Naturally present as pectin in fruit, but in varying concentrations, its effect often needs to be reinforced with another gelling agent. Which one should you choose?
Instructions
- The traditional method: apple juice, at a rate of 200g per kilo of fruit. The recipe: wash and cut 1kg of apples into quarters (with skin and core). Cover with 2 litres of water and bring to the boil. Once the apples are cooked, place them in a cloth (muslin) and collect the juice. Use immediately or freeze as needed.
- Apple pips and peel, or fruit stones, placed in a muslin bag or spice ball for the duration of cooking.
- Jam sugar, enriched with pectin (jam-setting sugar), available in shops, is very practical and lets you use less sugar; it's added to the boiling jam. Be careful with the dosage: its setting power is revealed once the jam cools. The risk is using too much and ending up with a jam that's too firm!
- Another option: combine fruits rich in pectin with fruits that lack it (an apple-blackberry pairing, for example).
Find our complete fruit-by-fruit guide in our article Fruit Pectin Content . And if you would rather leave the perfect balance to us, discover our strawberry, raspberry and apricot jams, carefully crafted recipes designed to achieve the right balance of fruit, texture and flavour.
