Blueberry Maple Jam

The 7th Annual Wild Blueberry Festival was this weekend at the Evergreen Brick Works, and we took full advantage. In addition to buying a large basket of berries, we bought more peaches and strawberries. After putting our kids to bed, my wife and I set out to make three different jams on a weeknight.

I won’t go into too much detail about the other jams, as we just followed the pectin box directions for the most part. For the 100% peach jam, we used Pomona’s pectin, adding an extra cup of fruit, so that it had a softer set. For the strawberry-peach jam, we used Certo Light (reduced sugar) pectin, combining 2 cups strawberries with 3 cups peaches, and 2 cups sugar. We knew this wasn’t enough sugar to fully set the jam, but we like a runnier consistency anyway, as well as preferring less sugar.

Blueberry Maple Jam

Our go-to reference and inspiration this summer has been the Batch cookbook. This blueberry jam recipe is a formula that the authors have been refining over the years. We used it as a guideline for our version, which was less sweet, and was set with commercial pectin. Our quantities were:

  • 6 cups wild blueberries
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 2/3 cup maple syrup
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 1 package of Certo Light Pectin (blue box)

The original directions call for macerating and crushing the berries for a few hours, but we didn’t have time to do that, so we skipped it. We basically followed the pectin box directions, but our own ingredients. To avoid diminishing the incredible flavour of the berries, we omitted the cinnamon stick and lemon zest.

Blueberry Maple Jam

As we expected, the taste of this jam was amazing: a deep blueberry flavour, with maple notes. Summer, captured in a jar (five, to be precise)!

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