Readers React:Anonymous Asks About Pectin
An anonymous reader posted an interesting question:
I noticed that most of your preserves or jams do not call for any type of pectin. Does this mean they have to go in the fridge, or is there enough natural pectin to allow them to be safely canned without it?
I tried to answer Anonymous in the COMMENTS section but my response is too long (naturally). Realizing that the question may be useful to other readers as well, I'm posting it here. Pectin and spoilage are two separate topics, as we'll see below, and each is a big one on its own. This is just a brief introduction to two crucial concepts for all jammers to study and understand.
(The pictures, incidentally, are from last night's trip to the Los Angeles County Fair to gawk at the blue-ribbon preserves. Details are at the bottom of this post.)
Pectin isn't a preservative -- it's a jelling agent -- so you can safely can sweet preserves without the addition of commercial pectin.
What is pectin?
Pectin is a carbohydrate that occurs naturally in fruits. It reaches its highest concentration just before the fruit ripens. This is why for jams and other sweet preserves, one should always choose fruits that are just barely ripe, and even throw in a few greenish or half-ripe ones.
Certain fruits such as apples and citrus naturally produce lots of pectin, while others including cherries have much less. Sweet preserves made with high-pectin fruits set more readily.
How does pectin work?
During cooking, the natural pectin in fruit reacts with the added sugar and acid (such as the lemon juice included in many jam recipes) to cause the mixture to thicken. In addition, as the preserve cooks down, it sheds water through evaporation, which both reduces the liquid content of the jam, making it thicker, and concentrates the pectin to increase its jelling effect. Through long reduction, a high-pectin fruit such as plums can be cooked down enough to form a dense paste thick enough to cut into cubes. The pectin actually solidifies the preserve.
So Greenvalley preserves do have pectin in them. It's just that I rely on naturally-present pectin instead of adding commercial pectin as a supplement.
If you choose, you can add commercial (store bought) pectin to your preserve. Commercial pectin is extracted from apples or citrus and sold in either powdered or liquid form. While there's nothing inherently wrong with it, I prefer the consistency and quality of sweet preserves made without it. It's a matter of taste and personal preference, but i'll admit it's one I feel pretty strongly about.
Commercial pectin isn't required for jam, so why use it? The beauty of jam is that it's just two things -- fruit and sugar -- combined over heat. I personally cherish that simplicity. The traditional or "slow-cooked" jams that are Greenvalley's signature are made without commercial pectin and demand a bit more work in the kitchen, but I think the superior results are worth the extra time and attention.
Having said all that, Anonymous's primary concern about food safety is indeed relevant and commendable. For jams and other sweet preserves, the preservative agent that prevents the growth of bacteria, mold and yeast—what Eugenia Bone collectively calls "spoilers"—is sugar.
I sometimes get frustrated when people complain that jam has too much sugar. Jam is, by definition, fruit preserved with sugar. And compared to the amount of sugar in, say, a slice of cake or a can of Coca-Cola, I find the quantity of sugar in jam acceptable.
Consider: if you eat a tablespoon of jam on toast, you're eating a little more than one teaspoon of fruit preserved with a little less than one teaspoon of sugar. By comparison, there are about ten teaspoons of sugar in a single 12-ounce can of Coke. You'd have to eat a lot of jam to ingest that much sugar. And even if you did, you'd also be eating an ample portion of real fruit with all its healthful nutrients, vitamins and antioxidants.
Why does sugar work as a preservative?
As I understand it, sugar inhibits microbial growth because when present in sufficient concentration, it creates an inhospitable osmotic environment that greatly slows the growth of spoilers. In other words, the spoilers can't survive because the concentration of sugar interrupts their basic cellular function -- ie, the movement of water and nutrients across the osmotic barrier of the cell wall. This osmotic exchange is vitally necessary for the spoilers to live and multiply. Sugar is their killer. Salt will do the same thing for much the same reason (it's also a desiccant), which is why many foods including fruit (lemons), meat (ham) and fish (smoked salmon) can be preserved by heavy salting.
Finally: anybody can of course make a fresh jam with a modicum of sugar or none at all. What you'd have is a stew of cooked fruit and it would no doubt be delicious. But whatever portion of it you don't eat right away should be stored in the fridge. If you leave this low-sugar fresh jam on the counter for a few days, it will go moldy and start to ferment. The spoilers will thrive and conquer.
The LA County Fair was fun—all ferris wheels, funnel cakes and those spinny rides that used to make me puke—but the Ag component was weak. You had to pay a buck to see the World's Largest Steer ("2500 pounds of hamburger on the hoof!"), which I declined to do.
I went with Mathew, who is from rural Minnesota, and we were both disappointed by the preserved food competition. Most of the championships ribbons went to Francine Rippy, and while I send her all due credit for her range of preserves, it has to be said that she didn't face much challenge. And much of what did stand in as here competition was, it appeared to me, of variable quality. Next year I'll enter some Greenvalley jams to challenge Ms. Rippy's dominance in the field. I hope you'll do the same.
Reader Comments (5)
yeah, we went yesterday and it took 6 hours of wandering to finally find the one little glass case that had all the preserves in it. Hubby and I also came to the conclusion that there wasnt a whole lot of competition, saw alot of the same names entering every catagory- all the more power to them. I also wish they would have arranged the food competitions by catagory and labeled them a bit more, some of the cakes looked downright lopsided and child decorated but wasnt labeled as such, don't they have seperate catagories for 4-H/youth and adult catagories? Anyway, I may enter next year just for the fun of it.
I may do the same. Your recipe for figs with wild aromatics is out of this world! Thank YOU!
I've had no experience canning or preserving, but you inspired me to take advantage of the one fruit growing plentifully in my little patch of Sunset Western Garden Death Zone 11 -- the Prickly Pear. Every year, I've looked at the big opuntia cactus next to my front gate here in Twentynine Palms and thought: "wow, the birds and coyotes are gonna get them again this year..."
Well, I finally did something about it and the result was, after harvesting about 95 prickly pears, 12 teeny little 4 oz. jars of Prickly Pear Marmalade. And it is delicious! I'd love to send you a jar of this precious stuff as a thank you for the inspiration. If so, you can email me a mailing address at nicolep7@aol.com.
I also posted a photo album on Facebook documenting the process. I still can't quite believe I harvested and processed all those exquisite little ruby-red sticker bombs!
cheers!
Nicole Panter
Hmmm. Why use commercial pectin? There are a couple reasons I can think of: 1) to gel something that would not otherwise gel on it's own (pineapple), 2) to more firmly gel things that gel poorly, 3) to provide a texture that is familiar to many people, and (most importantly) 4) to make jams or jellies with certain fruits where the loss of the volatile flavor compounds by exteneded boiling is too heartbreaking to contemplate. Peak-season peaches, plant-ripened Michigan strawberries (or their tiny wild cousins that are *amazing*), or the tiny super-fragrant jewel-red plums of early september you can sometimes find at the market that almost smell like perfume are all fruits where boiling them a second longer than absolutely necessary is virtually criminal! Many times, you can get away with as little as five minutes for the fruit, and one minute for liquid pectin, and then the remaining volatiles get captured in jars before processing. Commercial pectin can be a workhorse for some, or just an occasional valuable tool for other situations.
Oh, and may I suggest the fave jam we've done this season (of about 16 types): peach infused with Earl Grey tea. Just toss a couple tea bags into the peach boil during preparation (or some loose leaf in a good stainless ball). Absolutely heavenly, and the results are like eating summer.
I just want to say I read with great interest your article in my magazine- Bon Appetit and was inspired to try several of the recipes-- they have been absolutely awesome. I grew up in the midwest and my mother would can all fruits and vegetables all summer long. It has been refreshing to try this amidst a busy, hectic summer-- thank you!!!!